Introductory Essay on Caste (part 2)

The totem-clan held itself to partake of the life of its totem, and on the above hypothesis one common life would flow through all the animals and plants of the totem and all the members of the clan. An Australian calls his totem his Wingong (friend) or Tumang (flesh), and nowadays expresses his sorrow when he has to eat it. If a man wishes to injure any man of a certain totem, he kills any animal of that man’s totem. This clearly shows that one common life is held to bind together all the animals of the totem-species and all the members of the totem-clan, and the belief seems to be inexplicable on any other hypothesis. The same is the case with the sex-totems of the Kurnai tribe. In addition to the clan-totems all the boys have the Superb Warbler bird as a sex-totem, and call it their elder brother; and all the girls the Emu-wren, and call it their elder sister. If the boys wish to annoy the girls, or vice versa, each kills or injures the other’s totem-bird, and such an act is always followed by a free fight between the boys and girls. Sex-totems are a peculiar development which need not be discussed here, but again it would appear that a common life runs through the birds of the totem and the members of the sex. Professor Robertson Smith describes the clan or kin as follows: “A kin was a group of persons whose lives were so bound up together, in what must be called a physical unity, that they could be treated as parts of one common life. The members of one kindred looked on themselves as one living whole, one single animated mass of blood, flesh and bones, of which no member could be touched without all the members suffering. This point of view is expressed in the Semitic tongue in many familiar forms of speech. In case of homicide Arabian tribesmen do not say, ‘The blood of M. or N. has been spilt’ (naming the man): they say, ‘Our blood has been spilt.’ In Hebrew the phrase by which one claims kinship is, ‘I am your bone and your flesh.’ Both in Hebrew and in Arabic flesh is synonymous with ‘clan’ or kindred group.” The custom of the blood-feud appears to have arisen from the belief in a common life of the clan. “The blood-feud is an institution not peculiar to tribes reckoning descent through females; and it is still in force. By virtue of its requirements every member of a kin, one of whom had suffered at the hands of a member of another kin, was bound to avenge the wrong upon the latter kin. Such is the solidarity between members of a kin that vengeance might be taken upon any member of the offending kin, though he might be personally quite innocent. In the growth of civilisation vengeance has gradually come to be concentrated upon the offender only.” Thus the blood-feud appears to have originated from the idea of primary retributive justice between clan and clan. When a member of a clan had been killed, one of the offending clan must be killed in return. Who he might be, and whether the original homicide was justifiable or not, were questions not regarded by primitive man; motives were abstract ideas with which he had no concern; he only knew that a piece of the common life had been lopped off, and the instinct of self-preservation of the clan demanded that a piece of the life of the offending clan should be cut off in return. And the tie which united the kin was eating and drinking together. “According to antique ideas those who eat and drink together are by this very act tied to one another by a bond of friendship and mutual obligation.” This was the bond which first united the members of the totem-clan both among themselves and with their totem. And the relationship with the totem could only have arisen from the fact that they ate it. The belief in a common life could not possibly arise in the totem-clan towards any animal or plant which they did not eat or otherwise use. These they would simply disregard. Nor would savages, destitute at first of any moral ideas, and frequently on the brink of starvation, abstain from eating any edible animal from sentimental considerations; and, as already seen, the first totems were generally edible. They could not either have in the first place eaten the totem ceremonially, as there would be no reason for such a custom. But the ceremonial eating of the domestic animal, which was the tie subsequently uniting the members of the tribe, cannot be satisfactorily explained except on the hypothesis that it was evolved from the customary eating of the totem-animal. Primitive savages would only feel affection towards the animals which they ate, just as the affection of animals is gained by feeding them. The objection might be made that savages could not feel affection and kinship for an animal which they killed and ate, but no doubt exists that they do.

“In British Columbia, when the fishing season commenced and the fish began coming up the rivers, the Indians used to meet them and speak to them. They paid court to them and would address them thus: ‘You fish, you fish; you are all chiefs, you are; you are all chiefs.’ Among the Northas when a bear is killed, it is dressed in a bonnet, covered with fine down, and solemnly invited to the chiefs presence.” And there are many other instances. Savages had no clear realisation of death, and they did not think that the life of the animal was extinguished but that it passed to them with the flesh. Moreover they only ate part of the life. In many cases also the totem-animal only appeared at a certain season of the year, in consequence of the habit of hibernation or migration in search of food, while trees only bore fruit in their season. The savage, regarding all animals and plants as possessed of self-conscious life and volition, would think that they came of their own accord to give him subsistence or life. Afterwards, when they had obtained the idea of a soul or spirit, and of the survival of the soul after death, and when, on the introduction of personal names, the personality of individuals could be realised and remembered after death, they frequently thought that the spirits of ancestors went back to the totem-animal, whence they derived their life. The idea of descent from the totem would thus naturally arise. As the means of subsistence increased, and especially in those communities which had domesticated animals or cultivated plants, the conception of the totem as the chief source of life would gradually die away and be replaced by the belief in descent from it; and when they also thought that the spirits of ancestors were in the totem, they would naturally abstain from eating it. Perhaps also the Australians consider that the members of the totem-clan should abstain from eating the totem for fear of injuring the common life, as more advanced communities abstained from eating the flesh of domestic animals. This may be the ground for the rule that they should only eat sparingly of the totem. To the later period may be ascribed the adoption of carnivorous animals as totems; when these animals came to be feared and also venerated for their qualities of strength, ferocity and courage, warriors would naturally wish to claim kinship with and descent from them.

66. Living and eating together.

When the members of the totem-clan who lived together recognised that they owed something to each other, and that the gratification of the instincts and passions of the individual must to a certain degree be restrained if they endangered the lives and security of other members of the clan, they had taken the first step on the long path of moral and social progress. The tie by which they supposed themselves to be united was quite different from those which have constituted a bond of union between the communities who have subsequently lived together in the tribe, the city-state and the country. These have been a common religion, common language, race, or loyalty to a common sovereign; but the real bond has throughout been the common good or the public interest. And the desire for this end on the part of the majority of the members of the community, or the majority of those who were able to express their opinions, though its action was until recently not overt nor direct, and was not recognised, has led to the gradual evolution of the whole fabric of law and moral feeling, in order to govern and control the behaviour and conduct of the individual in his relations with his family, neighbours and fellow-citizens for the public advantage. The members of the totem-clan would have been quite unable to understand either the motives by which they were themselves actuated or the abstract ideas which have united more advanced communities; but they devised an even stronger bond than these, in supposing that they were parts or fractions of one common body or life. This was the more necessary as their natural impulses were uncontrolled by moral feeling. They conceived the bond of union in the concrete form of eating together. As language improved and passing events were recorded in speech and in the mind, the faculty of memory was perhaps concurrently developed. Then man began to realise the insecurity of his life, the dangers and misfortunes to which he was subject, the periodical failure or irregularity of the supply of food, and the imminent risks of death. Memory of the past made him apprehensive for the future, and holding that every event was the result of an act of volition, he began to assume an attitude either of veneration, gratitude, or fear towards the strongest of the beings by whom he thought his destinies were controlled—the sun, moon, sky, wind and rain, the ocean and great rivers, high mountains and trees, and the most important animals of his environment, whether they destroyed or assisted to preserve his life. The ideas of propitiation, atonement and purification were then imparted to the sacrifice, and it became an offering to a god. But the primary idea of eating or drinking together as a bond of union was preserved, and can be recognised in religious and social custom to an advanced period of civilisation.

67. The origin of exogamy.

Again, Dr. Westermarck shows that the practice of exogamy or the avoidance of intermarriage did not at first arise between persons recognised as blood relations, but between those who lived together. “Facts show that the extent to which relatives are not allowed to intermarry is nearly connected with their close living together. Generally speaking the prohibited degrees are extended much further among savage and barbarous peoples than in civilised societies. As a rule the former, if they have not remained in the most primitive social condition of man, live not in separate families but in large households or communities, all the members of which dwell in very close contact with each other.” And later, after adducing the evil results of self-fertilisation in plants and close interbreeding in animals, Dr. Westermarck continues: “Taking all these facts into consideration, I cannot but believe that consanguineous marriages, in some way or other, are more or less detrimental to the species. And here I think we may find a quite sufficient explanation of the horror of incest; not because man at an early stage recognised the injurious influence of close intermarriage, but because the law of natural selection must inevitably have operated. Among the ancestors of man, as among other animals, there was no doubt a time when blood relationship was no bar to sexual intercourse. But variations here, as elsewhere, would naturally present themselves; and those of our ancestors who avoided in-and-in breeding would survive, while the others would gradually decay and ultimately perish. Thus an instinct would be developed, which would be powerful enough as a rule to prevent injurious unions. Of course it would display itself simply as an aversion on the part of individuals to union with others with whom they lived; but these as a matter of fact would be blood relations, so that the result would be the survival of the fittest.”

68. Promiscuity and female descent.

The instinct of exogamy first developed in the totem-clan when it was migratory and lived by hunting, at least among the Australians and probably the American Indians.

The first condition of the clan was one of sexual promiscuity, and in Totemism and Exogamy Sir J.G. Frazer has adduced many instances of periodical promiscuous debauchery which probably recall this state of things. The evil results which would accrue from in-breeding in the condition of promiscuity may have been modified by such incidents as the expulsion of the young males through the spasmodic jealousy of the older ones, the voluntary segregation of the old males, fights and quarrels leading to the rearrangement of groups, and the frequent partial destruction of a group, when the survivors might attach themselves to a new group. Primitive peoples attached the utmost importance to the rule of exogamy, and the punishments for the breach of it were generally more severe than those for the violation of the laws of affinity in civilised countries. The Australians say that the good spirit or the wise men prescribed to them the rule that the members of each totem-clan should not marry with each other. Similarly the Gonds say that their divine hero, Lingo, introduced the rule of exogamy and the division into clans before he went to the gods.

At first, however, the exogamous clan was not constituted by descent through males, but through females. The hypothesis that female everywhere preceded male descent is strongly supported by natural probability. In the first instance, the parentage of children was no more observed and remembered than that of animals. When first observed, it was necessarily through the mother, the identity of the father being wholly uncertain. The mother would also be the first parent to remember her children, her affection for them being based on one of the strongest natural instincts, whereas the father neither knew nor cared for his children until long afterwards. Sir J.G. Frazer has further shown that even now some of the Australian aborigines are ignorant of the physical fact of paternity and its relation to sexual intercourse. That such ignorance could have survived so long is the strongest evidence in favour of the universal priority of female to male descent. It is doubtful, however, whether even the mother could remember her children after they had become adult, prior to the introduction of personal names. Mr. M’Lennan states: “The tie between mother and child, which exists as a matter of necessity during infancy, is not infrequently found to be lost sight of among savages on the age of independence being reached.” Personal names were probably long subsequent to clan-names, and when they were first introduced the name usually had some reference to the clan. The Red Indians and other races have totem-names which are frequently some variant of the name of the totem. When personal names came to be generally introduced, the genesis of the individual family might soon follow, but the family could scarcely have come into existence in the absence of personal names. As a rule, in the exogamous clan with female descent no regard was paid to the chastity of women, and they could select their partners as they pleased. Mr. Hartland has shown in Primitive Paternity that in a large number of primitive communities the chastity of women was neither enforced nor desired by the men, this state of things being probably a relic of the period of female descent. Thus exogamy first arose through the women of the clan resorting to men outside it. When we consider the extreme rigour of life and the frequent danger of starvation to which the small clans in the hunting stage must have been exposed, it does not seem impossible that the evil effects of marriage within the clan may have been noticed. At that time probably only a minority even of healthy children survived, and the slight congenital weakness produced by in-breeding might apparently be fatal to a child’s chance of life. Possibly some dim perception may have been obtained of the different fates of the children of women who restricted their sexual relations to men within the clan and those who resorted to strangers, even though the nature of paternity may not have been understood. The strength of the feeling and custom of exogamy seems to demand some such recognition for its satisfactory explanation, though, on the other hand, the lateness of the recognition of the father’s share in the production of children militates against this view. The suggestion may be made also that the belief that the new life of a child must be produced by a spirit entering the woman, or other extraneous source, does not necessarily involve an ignorance of the physical fact of paternity; the view that the spirits of ancestors are reborn in children is still firmly held by tribes who have long been wholly familiar with the results of the commerce of the sexes. The practice of exogamy was no doubt, as shown by Dr. Westermarck, favoured and supported by the influence of novelty in sexual attraction, since according to common observation and experience sexual love or desire is more easily excited between strangers or slight acquaintances than between those who have long lived together in the same household or in familiar intercourse. In the latter case the attraction is dulled by custom and familiarity.

69. Exogamy with female descent.

The exogamous clan, with female descent, was, however, an unstable social institution, in that it had no regular provision for marriage nor for the incorporation of married couples. The men who associated with the women of the clan were not necessarily, nor as a rule, admitted to it, but remained in their own clans. How this association took place is not altogether clear. At a comparatively late period in Arabia, according to Professor Robertson Smith, the woman would have a tent, and could entertain outside men for a shorter or longer period according to her inclination. The practice of serving for a wife also perhaps dates from the period of female descent. The arrangement would have been that a man went and lived with a woman’s family and gave his services in return for her conjugal society. Whether the residence with the wife’s family was permanent or not is perhaps uncertain. When Jacob served for Leah and Rachel, society seems to have been in the early patriarchal stage, as Laban was their father and he was Laban’s sister’s son. But it seems doubtful whether his right was then recognised to take his wives away with him, for even after he had served fourteen years Laban pursued him, and would have taken them back if he had not been warned against doing so in a vision. The episode of Rachel’s theft of the images also seems to indicate that she intended to take her own household gods with her and not to adopt those of her husband’s house. And Laban’s chief anxiety was for the recovery of the images. A relic of the husband’s residence with his wife’s family during the period of female descent may perhaps be found in the Banjāra caste, who oblige a man to go and live with his wife’s father for a month without seeing her face. Under the patriarchal system this rule of the Banjāras is meaningless, though the general practice of serving for a wife survives as a method of purchase.

Among the Australian aborigines apparently the clans, or sections of them, wander about in search of food and game, and meet each other for more or less promiscuous intercourse. This may perhaps be supposed to have been the general primitive condition of society after the introduction of exogamy combined with female descent. And its memory is possibly preserved in the tradition of the Golden Age, golden only in the sense that man was not troubled either by memory or anticipation, and lived only for the day. The entire insecurity of life and its frequent end by starvation or a violent death did not therefore trouble him any more than is the case with animals. He took no thought for the morrow, nor did the ills of yesterday oppress his mind. As when one of a herd of deer is shot by a hunter and the others stand by it pityingly as it lies dying on the ground, uncertain of its mishap, though they would help it if they could; yet when they perceive the hunter they make quickly off and in a few minutes are again grazing happily a mile or two away: little or no more than this can primitive man be supposed to have been affected by the deaths of his fellows. But possibly, since he was carnivorous, the sick and old may have been killed for food, as is still the practice among some tribes of savages. In the natural course, however, more or less permanent unions, though perhaps not regular marriages, must have developed in the female exogamous clan, which would thus usually have men of other clans living with it. And since identification of individuals would be extremely difficult before the introduction of personal names, there would be danger that when two clans met, men and women belonging to the same totem-clan would have sexual intercourse. This offence, owing to the strength of the feeling for exogamy, was frequently held to entail terrible evils for the community, and was consequently sometimes punished with death as treason. Moreover, if we suppose a number of small clans, A, B, C, D and E, to meet each other again and again, and the men and women to unite promiscuously, it is clear that the result would be a mixture of relationships of a very incestuous character. The incest of brothers and sisters by the same father would be possible and of almost all other relations, though that of brothers and sisters by the same mother would not be caused. This may have been the reason for the introduction of the class system among the Australians and Red Indians, by which all the clans of a certain area were divided into two classes, and the men of any clan of one class could only marry or have intercourse with the women of a clan of the other class. By such a division the evil results of the mixture of totems in exogamous clans with female descent would be avoided. The class system was sometimes further strengthened by the rule, in Australia, that different classes should, when they met, encamp on opposite sides of a creek or other natural division; whilst among the Red Indians, the classes camp on opposite sides of the road, or live on different sides of the same house or street. In Australia, and very occasionally elsewhere, the class system has been developed into four and eight sub-classes. A man of one sub-class can only marry a woman of one other, and their children belong to one of those different from either the father’s or mother’s. This highly elaborate and artificial system was no doubt, as stated by Sir J. G. Frazer, devised for the purpose of preventing the intermarriage of parents and children belonging to different clans where there are four sub-classes, and of first cousins where there are eight sub-classes. The class system, however, would not appear to have been the earliest form of exogamy among the Australian tribes. Its very complicated character, and the fact that the two principal classes sometimes do not even have names, seem to preclude the idea of its having been the first form of exogamy, which is a strong natural feeling, so much so that it may almost be described as an instinct, though of course not a primitive animal instinct. And just as the totem clan, which establishes a sentiment of kinship between people who are not related by blood, was prior to the individual family, so exogamy, which forbids the marriage of people who are not related by blood, must apparently have been prior to the feeling simply against connections of persons related by blood or what we call incest. If the two-class system was introduced in Australia to prohibit the marriage of brothers and sisters at a time when they could not recognise each other in adult life, then on the introduction of personal names which would enable brothers and sisters to recognise and remember each other, the two-class system should have been succeeded by a modern table of prohibited degrees, and not by clan exogamy at all. It is suggested that the two-class system was a common and natural form of evolution of a society divided into exogamous totem clans with female descent, when a man was not taken into the clan of the woman with whom he lived. The further subdivision into four and eight sub-classes is almost peculiar to the Australian tribes; its development may perhaps be attributed to the fact that these tribes have retained the system of female descent and the migratory hunting method of life for an abnormally long period, and have evolved this special institution to prevent the unions of near relatives which are likely to occur under such conditions. The remains of a two-class system appear to be traceable among the Gonds of the Central Provinces. In one part of Bastar all the Gond clans are divided into two classes without names, and a man cannot marry a woman belonging to any clan of his own class, but must take one from a clan of the other class. Elsewhere the Gonds are divided into two groups of six-god and seven-god worshippers among whom the same rule obtains. Formerly the Gonds appear in some places to have had seven groups, worshipping different numbers of gods from one to seven, and each of these groups was exogamous. But after the complete substitution of male for female kinship in the clan, and the settlement of clans in different villages, the classes cease to fulfil any useful purpose. They are now disappearing, and it is very difficult to obtain any reliable information about their rules. The system of counting kinship through the mother, or female descent, has long been extinct in the Central Provinces and over most of India. Some survival of it, or at least the custom of polyandry, is found among the Nairs of southern India and in Thibet. Elsewhere scarcely a trace remains, and this was also the condition of things with the classical races of antiquity; so much so, indeed, that even great thinkers like Sir Henry Maine and M. Fustel de Coulanges, with the examples only of India, Greece and Rome before them, did not recognise the system of female descent, and thought that the exogamous clan with male descent was an extension of the patriarchal family, this latter having been the original unit of society. The wide distribution of exogamy and the probable priority of the system of female to that of male descent were first brought prominently to notice by Mr. M’Lennan. Still a distinct trace of the prior form survives here in the special relationship sometimes found to exist between a man and his sister’s children. This is a survival of the period when a woman’s children, under the rule of female descent, belonged to her own family and her husband or partner in sexual relations had no proprietary right or authority over them, the place and authority of a father belonging in such a condition of society to the mother’s brother or brothers. Among the Halbas a marriage is commonly arranged when practicable between a brother’s daughter and a sister’s son. And a man always shows a special regard and respect for his sister’s son, touching the latter’s feet as to a superior, while whenever he desires to make a gift as an offering of thanks and atonement, or as a meritorious action, the sister’s son is the recipient. At his death he usually leaves a substantial legacy, such as one or two buffaloes, to his sister’s son, the remainder of the property going to his own family. Similarly among the Kamārs the marriage of a man’s children with his sister’s children is considered the most suitable union. If a man’s sister is poor, he will arrange for the weddings of her children. He will never beat his sister’s children however much they may deserve it, and he will not permit his sister’s son or daughter to eat from the dish from which he eats. The last rule, it is said, also applies to the maternal aunt. The Kunbis, and other Marātha castes, have a saying: ‘At the sister’s house the brother’s daughter is a daughter-in-law.’ The Gonds call the wedding of a brother’s daughter to a sister’s son Dūdh lautāna, or ‘bringing back the milk.’ The reason why a brother was formerly anxious to marry his daughter to his sister’s son was that the latter would be his heir under the matriarchal system; but now that inheritance is through males, and girls are at a premium for marriage, a brother is usually more anxious to get his sister’s daughter for his son, and on the analogy of the opposite union it is sometimes supposed, as among the Gonds, that he also has a right to her. Many other instances of the special relation between a brother and his sister’s children are given by Sir J.G. Frazer in Totemism and Exogamy. In some localities also the Korkus build their villages in two long lines of houses on each side of the road, and it may be the case that this is a relic of the period when two or more clans with female descent lived in the same village, and those belonging to each class who could not marry or have sexual relations among themselves occupied one side of the road.

70. Marriage.

The transfer of the reckoning of kinship and descent from the mother’s to the father’s side may perhaps be associated with the full recognition of the physical fact of paternity. Though they may not have been contemporaneous in all or even the majority of societies, it would seem that the former was in most cases the logical outcome of the latter, regard being had also to the man’s natural function as protector of the family and provider of its sustenance. But this transition from female to male kinship was a social revolution of the first importance. Under the system of female descent there had been generally no transfer of clanship; both the woman and her partner or husband retained their own clans, and the children belonged to their mother’s clan. In the totemic stage of society the totem-clan was the vital organism, and the individual scarcely realised his own separate existence, but regarded himself as a member of his totem-clan, being a piece or fraction of a common life which extended through all the members of the clan and all the totem animals of the species. They may have thought also that each species of animals and plants had a different kind of life, and consequently also each clan whose life was derived from, and linked to, that of its totem-species. For the name, and life, and qualities, and flesh and blood were not separate conceptions, but only one conception; and since the name and qualities were part of the life, the life of one species could not be the same as that of another, and every species which had a separate name must have been thought to have a different kind of life. Nor would man have been regarded as a distinct species in the early totem-stage, and there would be no word for man; but each totem-clan would regard itself as having the same life as its totem-species. With the introduction of the system of male kinship came also the practice of transferring a woman from her own clan to that of her husband. It may be suggested that this was the origin of the social institution of marriage. Primitive society had no provision for such a procedure, which was opposed to its one fundamental idea of its own constitution, and involved a change of the life and personality of the woman transferred.

71. Marriage by capture.

The view seems to have been long held that this transfer could only be effected by violence or capture, the manner in which presumably it was first practised. Marriage by capture is very widely prevalent among savage races, as shown by Mr. M’Lennan in Primitive Marriage, and by Dr. Westermarck in The History of Human Marriage. Where the custom has given place to more peaceable methods of procuring a wife, survivals commonly occur. In Bastar the regular capture of the girl is still sometimes carried out, though the business is usually arranged by the couple beforehand, and the same is the case among the Kolāms of Wardha. A regular part of the marriage procedure among the Gonds and other tribes is that the bride should weep formally for some hours, or a day before the wedding, and she is sometimes taught to cry in the proper note. At the wedding the bride hides somewhere and has to be found or carried off by the bridegroom or his brother. This ritualistic display of grief and coyness appears to be of considerable interest. It cannot be explained by the girl’s reluctance to marriage as involving the loss of her virginity, inasmuch as she is still frequently not a virgin at her wedding, and to judge from the analogy of other tribes, could seldom or never have been one a few generations back. Nor is affection for her family or grief at the approaching separation from them a satisfactory motive. This would not account for the hiding at all, and not properly for the weeping, since she will after all only live a few miles away and will often return home; and sometimes she does not only weep at her own house but at all the houses of the village. The suggestion may be made that the procedure really indicates the girl’s reluctance to be severed from her own clan and transferred to another; and that the sentiment is a survival of the resistance to marriage by capture which was at first imposed on the women by the men from loyalty to the clan totem and its common life, and had nothing to do with the conjugal relationship of marriage. But out of this feeling the sexual modesty of women, which had been non-existent in the matriarchal condition of society, was perhaps gradually developed. The Chamārs of Bilāspur have sham fights on the approach of the wedding party, and in most Hindu castes the bridegroom on his arrival performs some militant action, such as striking the marriage-shed or breaking one of its festoons. After the marriage the bride is nearly always sent home with the bridegroom’s party for a few days, even though she may be a child and the consummation of the marriage impossible. This may be in memory of her having formerly been carried off, and some analogous significance may attach to our honeymoon. When the custom of capture had died down it was succeeded by the milder form of elopement, or the bride was sold or exchanged against a girl from the bridegroom’s family or clan, but there is usually a relic of a formal transfer, such as the Hindu Kanyadān or gift of the virgin, the Roman Traditio in manum or her transfer from her father’s to her husband’s power, and the giving away of the bride.

72. Transfer of the bride to her husband’s clan.

These customs seem to mark the transfer of the woman from her father’s to her husband’s clan, which was in the first instance effected forcibly and afterwards by the free gift of her father or guardian, and the change of surname would be a relic of the change of clan. Among the Hindus a girl is never called by her proper name in her husband’s house, but always by some other name or nickname. This custom seems to be a relic of the period when the name denoted the clan, though it no longer has any reference either to the girl’s clan or family. Another rite portraying the transfer in India is the marking of the bride’s forehead with vermilion, which is no doubt a substitute for blood. The ceremony would be a relic of participation in the clan sacrifice when the bride would in the first place drink the blood of the totem animal or tribal god with the bridegroom in sign of her admission to his clan and afterwards be marked with the blood as a substitute. This smear of vermilion a married woman always continues to wear as a sign of her state, unless she wears pink powder or a spangle as a substitute. Where this pink powder (kunku) or spangles are used they must always be given by the bridegroom to the bride as part of the Sohāg or trousseau. At a Bhaina wedding the bride’s father makes an image in clay of the bird or animal of the groom’s sept and places it beside the marriage-post. The bridegroom worships the image, lighting a sacrificial fire before it, or offers to it the vermilion which he afterwards smears upon the forehead of the bride. The Khadāls at their marriages worship their totem animal or tree, and offer to it flowers, sandalwood, vermilion, uncooked rice, and the new clothes and ornaments intended for the bride, which she may not wear until this ceremony has been performed. Again, the sacrament of the Meher or marriage cakes is sometimes connected with the clan totem in India. These cakes are cooked and eaten sacramentally by all the members of the family and their relatives, the bride and bridegroom commencing first. Among the Kols the relatives to whom these cakes are distributed cannot intermarry, and this indicates that the eating of them was formerly a sacrament of the exogamous clan. The association of the totem with the marriage cakes is sometimes clearly shown. Thus in the Dahāit caste members of the clans named after certain trees, go to the tree at the time of their weddings and invite it to be present at the ceremony. They offer the marriage cakes to the tree. Those of the Nāgotia or cobra clan deposit the cakes at a snake’s hole. Members of the Singh (lion) and Bāgh (tiger) clans draw images of these animals on the wall at the time of their weddings and offer the cakes to them. The Basors of the Kulatia or somersault clan do somersaults at the time of eating the cakes; those of the Karai Nor clan, who venerate a well, eat the cakes at a well and not at home. Basors of the Lurhia clan, who venerate a grinding-stone, worship this implement at the time of eating the marriage cakes. M. Fustel de Coulanges states that the Roman Confarreatio, or eating of a cake together by the bride and bridegroom in the presence of the family gods of the latter, constituted their holy union or marriage. By this act the wife was transferred to the gods and religion of her husband. Here the gods referred to are clearly held to be the family gods, and in the historical period it seems doubtful whether the Roman gens was still exogamous. But if the patriarchal family developed within the exogamous clan tracing descent through males, and finally supplanted the clan as the most important social unit, then it would follow that the family gods were only a substitute for the clan gods, and the bride came to be transferred to her husband’s family instead of to his clan. The marriage ceremony in Greece consisted of a common meal of a precisely similar character, and the English wedding cake seems to be a survival of such a rite. At their weddings the Bhīls make cakes of the large millet juāri, calling it Juāri Māta or Mother Juāri. These cakes are eaten at the houses of the bride and bridegroom by the members of their respective clans, and the remains are buried inside the house as sacred food. Dr. Howitt states of the Kurnai tribe: “By and by, when the bruises and perhaps wounds received in these fights (between the young men and women) had healed, a young man and a young woman might meet, and he, looking at her, would say, for instance, ‘Djiitgun! What does the Djiitgun eat?’ The reply would be ‘She eats kangaroo, opossum,’ or some other game. This constituted a formal offer and acceptance, and would be followed by the elopement of the couple as described in the chapter on Marriage.” There is no statement that the question about eating refers to the totem, but this must apparently have been the original bearing of the question, which otherwise would be meaningless. Since this proposal of marriage followed on a fight between the boys and girls arising from the fact that one party had injured the other party’s sex-totem, the fight may perhaps really have been a preliminary to the proposal and have represented a symbolic substitute for or survival of marriage by capture. Among the Santāls, Colonel Dalton says, “the social meal that the boy and girl eat together is the most important part of the ceremony, as by the act the girl ceases to belong to her father’s tribe and becomes a member of the husband’s family.” Since the terms tribe and family are obviously used loosely in the above statement, we may perhaps substitute clan in both cases. Many other instances of the rite of eating together at a wedding are given by Dr. Westermarck. If, therefore, it be supposed that the wedding ceremony consisted originally of the formal transfer of the bride to the bridegroom’s clan, and further that the original tie which united the totem-clan was the common eating of the totem animal, then the practice of the bride and bridegroom eating together as a symbol of marriage can be fully understood. When the totem animal had ceased to be the principal means of subsistence, bread, which to a people in the agricultural stage had become the staff or chief support of life, was substituted for it, as argued by Professor Robertson Smith in The Religion of the Semites. If the institution of marriage was thus originally based on the forcible transfer of a woman from her own to her husband’s clan, certain Indian customs become easily explicable in the light of this view. We can understand why a Brāhman or Rājpūt thought it essential to marry his daughter into a clan or family of higher status than his own; because the disgrace of having his daughter taken from him by what had been originally an act of force, was atoned for by the superior rank of the captor or abductor. And similarly the terms father-in-law and brother-in-law would be regarded as opprobrious because they originally implied not merely that the speaker had married the sister or daughter of the person addressed, but had married her forcibly, thereby placing him in a position of inferiority. A Rājpūt formerly felt it derogatory that any man should address him either as father-or brother-in-law. And the analogous custom of a man refusing to take food in the house of his son-in-law’s family and sometimes even refusing to drink water in their village would be explicable on precisely the same grounds. This view of marriage would also account for the wide prevalence of female infanticide. Because in the primitive condition of exogamy with male descent, girls could not be married in their own clan, as this would transgress the binding law of exogamy, and they could not be transferred from their own totem-clan and married in another except by force and rape. Hence it was thought better to kill girl children than to suffer the ignominy of their being forcibly carried off. Both kinds of female infanticide as distinguished by Sir H. Risley would thus originally be due to the same belief. The Khond killed his daughter because she could not be married otherwise than by forcible abduction; not necessarily because he was unable to protect her, but because he could not conceive of her being transferred from one totem-clan to another by any other means; and he was bound to resist the transfer because by acquiescing in it, he would have been guilty of disloyalty to his own totem, whose common life was injured by the loss of the girl. The Rājpūt killed his daughter because it was a disgrace to him to get her married at all outside his clan, and she could not be married within it. Afterwards the disgrace was removed by marrying her into a higher clan than his own and by lavish expenditure on the wedding; and the practice of female infanticide was continued to avoid the ruinous outlay which this primitive view of marriage had originally entailed. The Hindu custom of the Swayamvāra or armed contest for the hand of a Rājpūt princess, and the curious recognition by the Hindu law-books of simple rape as a legitimate form of marriage would be explained on the same ground.

73. The exogamous clan with male descent and the village.

It has been seen that the exogamous clan with female descent contained no married couples, and therefore it was necessary either that outside men should live with it, or that the clans should continually meet each other, or that two or more should live in the same village. With the change to male descent and the transfer of women to their husbands’ clans, this unstable characteristic was removed. Henceforth the clan was self-contained, having its married couples, both members of it, whose children would also be born in and belong to it. Since the clan was originally a body of persons who wandered about and hunted together, its character would be maintained by living together, and there is reason to suppose that the Indian exogamous clan with male descent took its special character because its members usually lived in one or more villages. This fact would account for the large number and multiplication of clans in India as compared with other places. As already seen one of the names of a clan is khera, which also means a village, and a large number of the clan names are derived from, or the same, as those of villages. Among the Khonds all the members of one clan live in the same locality about some central village. Thus the Tupa clan are collected about the village of Teplagārh in Patna State, the Loa clan round Sindhekala, the Borga clan round Bangomunda and so on. The Nunias of Mīrzāpur, Mr. Crooke remarks, have a system of local subdivisions called dīh, each subdivision being named after the village which is supposed to be its home. The word dīh itself means a site or village. Those who have the same dīh do not intermarry. In the villages first settled by the Oraons, Father Dehon states, the population is divided into three khunts or branches, the founders of the three branches being held to have been sons of the first settler. Members of each branch belong to the same clan or got. Each khunt or branch has a share of the village lands. The Mochis or cobblers have forty exogamous sections or gotras, mostly named after Rājpūt clans, and they also have an equal number of kheras or groups named after villages. The limits of the two groups seem to be identical; and members of each group have an ancestral village from which they are supposed to have come. Marriage is now regulated by the Rājpūt sept-names, but the probability is that the kheras were the original divisions, and the Rājpūt gotras have been more recently adopted in support of the claims already noticed. The Parjas have totemistic exogamous clans and marriage is prohibited in theory between members of the same clan. But as the number of clans is rather small, the rule is not adhered to, and members of the same clan are permitted to marry so long as they do not come from the same village. The Mīnas of Rājputāna are divided into twelve exogamous pāls or clans; the original meaning of the word pāl was a defile or valley suitable for defence, where the members of the clan would live together as in a Scotch glen.

Thus among the cultivating castes apparently each exogamous clan consisted originally of the residents of one village, though they afterwards spread to a number of villages. The servile labouring castes may also have arranged their clans by villages as the primitive forest-tribes did. How the menial castes formed exogamous clans is not altogether clear, as the numbers in one village would be only small. But it may be supposed that as they gradually increased, clans came into existence either in one large village or a number of adjacent ones, and sometimes traced their descent from a single family or from an ancestor with a nickname. As a rule, the artisan castes do not appear to have formed villages of their own in India, as they did in Russia, though this may occasionally have happened. When among the cultivating castes the lands were divided, separate joint families would be constituted; the head only of each family would be its representative in the clan, as he would hold the share of the village land assigned to the family, which was their joint means of subsistence, and the family would live in one household. Thus perhaps the Hindu joint family came into existence as a subdivision of the exogamous clan with male descent, on which its constitution was modelled. In Chhattīsgarh families still live together in large enclosures with separate huts for the married couples. A human ancestor gradually took the place of the totem as the giver of life to the clan. The members thought themselves bound together by the tie of his blood which flowed through all their veins, and frequently, as in Athens, Rome and Scotland, every member of the clan bore his name. In this capacity, as the source of the clan’s life, the original ancestor was perhaps venerated, and on the development of the family system within the clan, the ancestors of the family were held in a similar regard, and the feeling extended to the living ancestor or father, who is treated with the greatest deference in the early patriarchal family. Even now Hindu boys, though they may be better educated and more intelligent than their father, will not as a rule address him at meals unless he speaks to them first, on account of their traditional respect for him. The regard for the father may be strengthened by his position as the stay and support of the family, but could scarcely have arisen solely from this cause.

Dr. Westermarck’s view that the origin of exogamy lay in the feeling against the marriage of persons who lived together, receives support from the fact that a feeling of kinship still subsists between Hindus living in the same village, even though they may belong to different castes and clans. It is commonly found that all the households of a village believe themselves in a manner related. A man will address all the men of the generation above his own as uncle, though they may be of different castes, and the children of the generation below his own as niece and nephew. When a girl is married, all the old men of the village call her husband ‘son-in-law.’ This extends even to the impure castes who cannot be touched. Yet owing to the fact that they live together they are considered by fiction to be related. The Gowāri caste do not employ Brāhmans for their weddings, but the ceremony is performed by the bhānja or sister’s son either of the girl’s father or the boy’s father. If he is not available, any one whom either the girl’s father or the boy’s father addresses as bhānja or nephew in the village, even though he may be no relation and may belong to another caste, may perform the ceremony as a substitute. Among the Oraons and other tribes prenuptial intercourse between boys and girls of the same village is regularly allowed. It is not considered right, however, that these unions should end in marriage, for which partners should be sought from other villages. In the Marātha country the villagers have a communal feast on the occasion of the Dasahra festival, the Kunbis or cultivators eating first and the members of the menial and labouring castes afterwards.

74. The large exogamous clans of the Brāhmans and Rājpūts. The Sapindas, the gens and the γένος.

The Brāhmans and Rājpūts, however, and one or two other military castes, as the Marāthas and Lodhis, do not have the small exogamous clans (which probably, as has been seen, represented the persons who lived together in a village), but large ones. Thus the Rājpūts were divided into thirty-six royal races, and theoretically all these should have been exogamous, marrying with each other. Each great clan was afterwards, as a rule, split into a number of branches, and it is probable that these became exogamous; while in cases where a community of Rājpūts have settled on the land and become ordinary cultivators, they have developed into an endogamous subcaste containing small clans of the ordinary type. It seems likely that the Rājpūt clan originally consisted of those who followed the chief to battle and fought together, and hence considered themselves to be related. This was, as a matter of fact, the case. Colonel Tod states that the great Rāthor clan, who said that they could muster a hundred thousand swords, spoke of themselves as the sons of one father. The members of the Scotch clans considered themselves related in the same manner, and they were probably of similar character to the Rājpūt clans. I do not know, however, that there is any definite evidence as to the exogamy of the Scotch clans, which would have disappeared with their conversion to Christianity. The original Rājpūt clan may perhaps have lived round the chiefs castle or headquarters and been supported by the produce of his private fief or demesne. The regular Brāhman gotras are also few in number, possibly because they were limited by the paucity of eponymous saints of the first rank. The word gotra means a stall or cow-pen, and would thus originally signify those who lived together in one place like a herd of cattle. But the gotras are now exceedingly large, the same ones being found in most or all of the Brāhman subcastes, and it is believed that they do not regulate marriage as a rule. Sometimes ordinary surnames have taken the place of clan names, and persons with the same surname consider themselves related and do not marry. But usually Brāhmans prohibit marriage between Sapindas or persons related to each other within seven degrees from a common ancestor. The word Sapinda signifies those who partake together of the pindas or funeral cakes offered to the dead. The Sapindas are also a man’s heirs in the absence of closer relations; the group of the Sapindas is thus an exact replica within the gotra of the primitive totem clan which was exogamous and constituted by the tie of living and eating together. Similarly marriage at Rome was prohibited to seven degrees of relationship through males within the gens, and this exogamous group of kinsmen appear to have been the body of agnatic kinsmen within the gens who are referred to by Sir H. Maine as a man’s ultimate heirs. At Athens, when a contest arose upon a question of inheritance, the proper legal evidence to establish kinship was the proof that the alleged ancestor and the alleged heir observed a common worship and shared in the same repast in honour of the dead. The distant heirs were thus a group within the Athenian γένος corresponding to the Sapindas and bound by the same tie of eating together. Professor Hearn states that there is no certain evidence that the Roman gens and Greek γένος were originally exogamous, but we find that of the Roman matrons whose names are known to us none married a husband with her own Gentile name; and further, that Plutarch, in writing of the Romans, says that in former days men did not marry women of their own blood or, as in the preceding sentence he calls them, kinswomen συγγενίδας, just as in his own day they did not marry their aunts or sisters; and he adds that it was long before they consented to wed with cousins. Professor Hearn’s opinion was that the Hindu gotra, the Roman gens and the Greek γένος were originally the same institution, the exogamous clan with male descent, and all the evidence available, as well as the close correspondence in other respects of early Hindu institutions with those of the Greek and Latin cities would tend to support this view.

75. Comparison of Hindu society with that of Greece and Rome. The gens.

In the admirable account of the early constitution of the city-states of Greece and Italy contained in the work of M. Fustel de Coulanges, La Cité Antique, a close resemblance may be traced with the main strata of Hindu society given earlier in this essay. The Roman state was composed of a number of gentes or clans, each gens tracing its descent from a common ancestor, whose name it usually bore. The termination of the Gentile name in ius signified descendant, as Claudius, Fabius, and so on. Similarly the names of the Athenian γένη or clans ended in ides or ades, as Butades, Phytalides, which had the same signification. The Gentile or clan name was the nomen or principal name, just as the personal names of the members of the totem-clans were at first connected with the totems. The members of the gens lived together on a section of the city land and cultivated it under the control of the head of the gens. The original ager Romanus is held to have been 115 square miles or about 74,000 acres, and this was divided up among the clans. The heads of clans originally lived on their estates and went in to Rome for the periodical feasts and other duties. The principal family or eldest branch of the gens in the descent from a common ancestor ranked above the others, and its head held the position of a petty king in the territory of the gens. In Greece he was called ἄναξ or βασιλεύς. Originally the Roman Senate consisted solely of the heads of gentes, and the consuls, flamens and augurs were also chosen exclusively from them; they were known as patres; after the expulsion of the kings, fresh senators were added from the junior branches of the gentes, of which there were at this period 160, and these were known as patres conscripti. The distinction between the eldest and junior branches of the gentes may have corresponded to the distinction between the Kshatriyas and Vaishyas, though as practically nothing is known of the constitution of the original Kshatriyas, this can only be hypothetical.

76. The clients.

Within the gens, and living in the household or households of its members, there existed a body of slaves, and also another class of persons called clients. The client was a servant and dependant; he might be assigned a plot of land by his patron, but at first could not transmit it nor hold it against his patron. It is probable that originally he had no right of property of his own, but he gradually acquired it. First he obtained a right of occupancy in his land and of its devolution to his son if he had one. Finally he was given the power of making a will. But he was still obliged to contribute to such expenses of the patron as ransom in war, fines imposed by the courts, or the dowry of a daughter. The client was considered as a member of the family and bore its name. But he was not a proper member of the family or gens, because his pedigree never ascended to a pater or the head of a gens. It was incumbent on the patron to protect the client, and guard his interests both in peace and war. The client participated in the household and Gentile sacrifices and worshipped the gods of the gens. At first the people of Rome consisted of three classes, the patricians, the clients and the plebeians. In course of time, as the rights and privileges of the plebeians increased after the appointment of tribunes, their position, from having originally been much inferior, became superior to that of the clients, and the latter preferred to throw off the tie uniting them to their patrons and become merged in the plebeians. In this manner the intermediate class of clients at length entirely disappeared. These clients must not be confused with the subsequent class of the same name, who are found during the later period of the republic and the empire, and were the voluntary supporters or hangers-on of rich men. It would appear that these early clients corresponded very closely to the household servants of the Indian cultivators, from whom the village menial castes were developed. The Roman client was sometimes a freed slave, but this would not have made him a member of the family, even in a subordinate position. Apparently the class of clients may have to a great extent originated in mixed descent, as the Indian household and village menials probably did. This view would account satisfactorily for the client’s position as a member of the family but not a proper one. From the fact that they were considered one of the three principal divisions of the people it is clear that the clients must at one time have been numerous and important.

77. The plebeians.

Below the clients came the plebeians, whose position, as M. Fustel de Coulanges himself points out, corresponded very closely to that of the Sūdras. The plebeians had no religion and no ancestors; they did not belong to a family or a gens. They were a despised and abject class, who lived like beasts outside the proper boundary of the city. The touch of the plebeian was impure. “When tribunes were created a special law was necessary to protect their life and liberty, and it was promulgated as follows: ‘It is forbidden to strike or kill a tribune, as if he was an ordinary plebeian.’ It would appear then that a patrician had the right to strike or kill an ordinary plebeian, or at least that he was amenable to no legal punishment for doing so.” Similarly in the ancient Greek cities the citizens were known as ἀγαθοί or good, and the plebeians as κακοί or bad. This latter class is described by the poet Theognis as having had aforetime neither tribunals nor laws; they were not allowed even to enter the town, but lived outside like wild beasts. They had no part in the religious feasts and could not intermarry with the proper citizens.

This position corresponds exactly with that of the Sūdras and the existing impure castes, who have to live outside the village and cannot enter or even approach Hindu temples.

M. de Coulanges considers that the plebeians were to a large extent made up of conquered and subjected peoples. An asylum was also established at Rome for broken men and outlaws from other cities, with a view to increasing the population and strength of the state. Subsequently the class of clients became absorbed among the plebeians.

78. The binding social tie in the city-states.

Thus the gradation of society in the city-states of Greece and Italy, the account given above being typical of them all, is seen to correspond fairly closely with that of the Hindus, as exemplified in the Hindu classics and the microcosm of Hindu society, the village community. It is desirable, therefore, to inquire what was the tie which united the members of the gens, the curia or phratry, and the city, and which distinguished the patricians from the plebeians. On this point M. Fustel de Coulanges leaves us in no doubt at all. The bond of union among all these bodies was a common sacrifice or sacrificial meal, at which all the members had to be present. “The principal ceremony of the religion of the household was a meal, which was called a sacrifice. To eat a meal prepared on an altar was, according to all appearance, the first form of religious worship.” “The principal ceremony of the religion of the city was also a public feast; it had to be partaken of communally by all the citizens in honour of the tutelary deities. The custom of holding these public feasts was universal in Greece; and it was believed that the safety of the city depended on their accomplishment.” M. de Coulanges quotes from the Odyssey an account of one of these sacred feasts at which nine long tables were set out for the people of Pylos; five hundred citizens were seated and nine bulls were slaughtered for each table. When Orestes arrived at Athens after the murder of his mother, he found the people, assembled round their king, about to hold the sacred feast. Similar feasts were held and numerous victims were slaughtered in Xenophon’s time. At these meals the guests were crowned with garlands and the vessels were of a special form and material, such as copper or earthenware, no doubt dating from the antique past. As regards the importance and necessity of being present at the Gentile sacrificial feast, the same author states: “The Capitol was blockaded by the Gauls; but Fabius left it and passed through the hostile lines, clad in religious garb, and carrying in his hand the sacred objects; he was going to offer a sacrifice on the altar of his gens which was situated on the Quirinal. In the second Punic war another Fabius, he who was called the buckler of Rome, was holding Hannibal in check; it was assuredly of the greatest importance to the Republic that he should not leave his army; he left it, however, in the hands of the imprudent Minucius; it was because the anniversary day of the sacrifice of his gens had come and it was necessary that he should hasten to Rome to perform the sacred rite.” In Greece the members of the gens were known by the fact that they performed communal sacrifices together from a remote period. As already seen, a communal sacrifice meant the eating together of the sacred food, whether the flesh of a victim or grain.

79. The Suovetaurilia.

The Roman city sacrifice of the Suovetaurilia, as described by M. de Coulanges, is of the greatest interest. The magistrate whose duty it was to accomplish it, that is in the first place the king, after him the consul, and after him the censor, had first to take the auspices and ascertain that the gods were favourable. Then he summoned the people through a herald by a consecrated form of words. On the appointed day all the citizens assembled outside the walls; and while they stood silent the magistrate proceeded three times round the assembly, driving before him three victims—a pig, a ram and a bull. The combination of these three victims constituted with the Greeks as well as the Romans an expiatory sacrifice. Priests and attendants followed the procession: when the third round had been accomplished, the magistrate pronounced a prayer and slaughtered the victims. From this moment all sins were expiated, and neglect of religious duties effaced, and the city was at peace with its gods.

There were two essential features of this ceremony: the first, that no stranger should be present at it; and the second, that no citizen should be absent from it. In the latter case the whole city might not have been freed from impurity. The Suovetaurilia was therefore preceded by a census, which was conducted with the greatest care both at Rome and Athens. The citizen who was not enrolled and was not present at the sacrifice could no longer be a member of the city. He could be beaten and sold as a slave, this rule being relaxed only in the last two centuries of the Republic. Only male citizens were present at the sacrifice, but they gave a list of their families and belongings to the censor, and these were considered to be purified through the head of the family.

This sacrifice was called a lustratio or purification, and in the historical period was considered to be expiatory. But it does not seem probable that this was its original significance. For there would not in that case have been the paramount necessity for every citizen to be present. All females and children under power were purified through the list given to the censor, and there seems no reason why absent citizens could not have been purified in the same manner. But participation in this sacrifice was itself the very test and essence of citizenship. And it has been seen that a public meal was the principal religious rite of the city. The conclusion therefore seems reasonable that the Suovetaurilia was originally also a sacrificial meal of which each citizen partook, and that the eating of the deified domestic animals in common was the essence of the rite and the act which conferred the privilege of citizenship. The driving of the sacrificial animals round the citizens three times might well be a substitute for the previous communal meal, if for any reason, such as the large number of citizens, the practice of eating them had fallen into abeyance. The original ground for the taking of a census was to ensure that all the citizens were present at the communal sacrifice; and it was by the place which a man occupied on this day that his rank in the city was determined till the next sacrifice. If the censor counted him among the senators, he remained a senator; if among the equites, he remained a knight; if as a simple member of a tribe, he belonged henceforward to the tribe in which he was counted. If the censor refused to enumerate him, he was no longer a citizen. Such was the vital importance of the act of participation in the sacrifice.

80. The sacrifice of the domestic animal.

The Roman sacrifice of the Suovetaurilia was in no way peculiar, similar rites being found in other Greek and Latin cities. Some instances are recorded in the article on Kasai, and in Themis Miss Jane Harrison gives an account of a sacrifice at Magnesia in which a bull, ram and he- and she-goats were sacrificed to the gods and partaken of communally by the citizens. As already seen, the act of participation in the sacrifice conferred the status of citizenship. The domestic animals were not as a rule eaten, but their milk was drunk, and they were used for transport, and clothes were perhaps sometimes made from their hair and skins. Hence they were the principal source of life of the tribe, as the totem had been of the clan, and were venerated and deified. One common life was held to run through all the members of the tribe and all the domestic animals of the species which was its principal means of support. In the totem or hunting stage the clan had necessarily been small, because a large collection of persons could not subsist together by hunting and the consumption of roots and fruits. When an additional means of support was afforded by the domestication of an important animal, a much larger number of persons could live together, and apparently several clans became amalgamated into a tribe. The sanctity of the domestic animals was much greater than that of the totem because they lived with man and partook of his food, which was the strongest tie of kinship; and since he still endowed them with self-consciousness and volition, he thought they had come voluntarily to aid him in sustaining life. Both on this account and for fear of injuring the common life they were not usually killed. But it was necessary to primitive man that the tie should take a concrete form and that he should actually assimilate the life of the sacred animal by eating its flesh, and this was accordingly done at a ceremonial sacrifice, which was held annually, and often in the spring, the season of the renewal and increase of life. Since this renewal of the communal life was the concrete tie which bound the tribe together, any one who was absent from it could no longer be a member of the tribe. The whole of this rite and the intense importance attached to it are inexplicable except on the supposition that the tie which had originally constituted the totem-clan was the eating of the totem-animal, and that this tie was perpetuated in the tribe by the communal eating of the domestic animal. The communal sacrifice of the domestic animal was, as already seen, typical of society in the tribal or pastoral stage. But one very important case, in addition to those given above and in the article on Kasai, remains for notice. The Id-ul-Zoha or Bakr-Id festival of the Muhammadans is such a rite. In pre-Islamic times this sacrifice was held at Mecca and all the Arab tribes went to Mecca to celebrate it. The month in which the sacrifice was held was one of those of truce, when the feuds between the different clans were in abeyance so that they could meet at Mecca. Muhammad continued the sacrifice of the Id-ul-Zoha and it is this sacrifice which a good Muhammadan takes the pilgrimage to Mecca to perform. He must be at Mecca on the tenth day of the month of Z’ul Hijjah and perform the sacrifice there, and unless he does this there is no special merit in making the journey to Mecca. It is incumbent on every Muhammadan who can afford it to make the pilgrimage to Mecca or the Hajj once in his life and perform the sacrifice there; and though as a matter of fact only a very small minority of Muhammadans now carry out the rule, the pilgrimage and sacrifice may yet be looked upon as the central and principal rite of the Muhammadan religion. All Muhammadans who cannot go to Mecca nevertheless celebrate the sacrifice at home at the Indian festival of the Id-ul-Zoha and the Turkish and Egyptian Idu-Bairām. At the Id-ul-Zoha any one of four domestic animals, the camel, the cow, the sheep or the goat, may be sacrificed; and this rule makes it a connecting link between the two great Semitic sacrifices described in the article on Kasai, the camel sacrifice of the Arabs in pre-Islamic times and the Passover of the Jews. At the present time one-third of the flesh of the sacrificial animal should be given to the poor, one-third to relations, and the remainder to the sacrificer’s own family. Though it has now become a household sacrifice, the communal character thus still partly survives.

81. Sacrifices of the gens and phratry.

Both in Athens and Rome there was a division known as phratry or curia. This apparently consisted of a collection of gentes, γένη, or clans, and would correspond roughly to a Hindu subcaste. The evidence does not show, however, that it was endogamous. The bond which united the phratry or curia was precisely the same as that of the gens or clan and the city. It consisted also in a common meal, which was prepared on the altar, and was eaten with the recitation of prayers, a part being offered to the god, who was held to be present. At Athens on feast-days the members of the phratry assembled round their altar. A victim was sacrificed and its flesh cooked on the altar, and divided among the members of the phratry, great care being taken that no stranger should be present. A young Athenian was presented to the phratry by his father, who swore that the boy was his son. A victim was sacrificed and cooked on the altar in the presence of all the members of the phratry; if they were doubtful of the boy’s legitimacy, and hence wished to refuse him admittance, as they had the right to do, they refused to remove the flesh from the altar. If they did not do this, but divided and partook of the flesh with the candidate, he was finally and irrevocably admitted to the phratry. The explanation of this custom, M. de Coulanges states, is that food prepared on an altar and eaten by a number of persons together, was believed to establish between them a sacred tie which endured through life. Even a slave was to a certain degree admitted into the family by the same tie of common eating of food. At Athens he was made to approach the hearth; he was purified by pouring water on his head, and ate some cakes and fruit with the members of the family. This ceremony was analogous to those of marriage and adoption. It signified that the new arrival, hitherto a stranger, was henceforth a member of the family and participated in the family worship.

82. The Hindu caste-feasts.

The analogy of Greece and Rome would suggest the probability that the tie uniting the members of the Indian caste or subcaste is also participation in a common sacrificial meal, and there is a considerable amount of evidence to support this view. The Confarreatio or eating together of the bride and bridegroom finds a close parallel in the family sacrament of the Meher or marriage cakes, which has already been described. This would appear formerly to have been a clan rite, and to have marked the admission of the bride to the bridegroom’s clan. It is obligatory on relations of the families to attend a wedding and they proceed from great distances to do so, and clerks and other officials are much aggrieved if the exigencies of Government business prevent them from obtaining leave. The obligation seems to be of the same character as that which caused Fabius to leave the army in order to attend his Gentile sacrifice at Rome. If he did not attend the Gentile sacrifice he was not a member of the gens, and if a Hindu did not attend the feast of his clan in past times perhaps he did not remain a member of the clan. Among the Marātha Brāhmans the girl-bride eats with her husband’s relations on this day only to mark her admission into their clan, and among the Bengali Brāhmans, when the wedding guests are collected, the bride comes and puts a little sugar on each of their leaf-plates, which they eat in token of their recognition of her in her new status of married woman. The members of the caste or subcaste also assemble and eat together on three occasions: at a marriage, which will have the effect of bringing new life into the community; at a death, when a life is lost; and at the initiation of a new member or the readmission of an offender temporarily put out of caste. It is a general rule of the caste feasts that all members of the subcaste in the locality must be invited, and if any considerable number of them do not attend, the host’s position in the community is impugned. For this reason he has to incur lavish expenditure on the feast, so as to avoid criticism or dissatisfaction among his guests. These consider themselves at liberty to comment freely on the character and quality of the provisions offered to them. In most castes the feast cannot begin until all the guests have assembled; the Maheshri Banias and one or two other castes are distinguished by the fact that they allow the guests at the pangat or caste feast to begin eating as they arrive. Those who bear the host a grudge purposely stay away, and he has to run to their houses and beg them to come, so that his feast can begin. When the feast has begun it was formerly considered a great calamity if any accident should necessitate the rising of the guests before its conclusion. Even if a dog or other impure animal should enter the assembly they would not rise. The explanation of this rule was that it would be disrespectful to Um Deo, the food-god, to interrupt the feast. At the feast each man sits with his bare crossed knees actually touching those of the men on each side of him, to show that they are one brotherhood and one body. If a man sat even a few inches apart from his fellows, people would say he was out of caste; and in recent times, since those out of caste have been allowed to attend the feasts, they sit a little apart in this manner. The Gowāris fine a man who uses abusive language to a fellow-casteman at a caste feast, and also one who gets up and leaves the feast without the permission of the caste headman. The Hatkars have as the names of two exogamous groups Wakmār, or one who left the Pangat or caste feast while his fellows were eating; and Polya, or one who did not take off his turban at the feast. It has been seen also that in one or two castes the exogamous sections are named after the offices which their members hold or the duties they perform at the caste feast. Among the Halbas the illegitimate subcaste Surāit is also known as Chhoti Pangat or the inferior feast, with the implication that its members cannot be admitted to the proper feast of the caste, but have an inferior one of their own.

83. Taking food at initiation.

When an outsider is admitted to the caste the rite is usually connected with food. A man who is to be admitted to the Dahāit caste must clean his house, break his earthen cooking-vessels and buy new ones, and give a feast to the caste-fellows in his house. He sits and takes food with them, and when the meal is over he takes a grain of rice from the leaf-plate of each guest and eats it, and drinks a drop of water from his leaf-cup. After this he cannot be readmitted to his own caste. A new Mehtar or sweeper gives water to and takes bread from each casteman. In Mandla a new convert to the Panka caste vacates his house and the caste panchāyat or committee go and live in it, in order to purify it. He gives them a feast inside the house, while he himself stays outside. Finally he is permitted to eat with the panchāyat in his own house in order to mark his admission into the caste. A candidate for admission in the Mahli caste has to eat a little of the leavings of the food of each of the castemen at a feast. The community of robbers known as Badhak or Baoria formerly dwelt in the Oudh forests. They were accustomed to take omens from the cry of the jackal, and they may probably have venerated it as representing the spirit of the forest and as a fellow-hunter. They were called jackal-eaters, and it was said that when an outsider was admitted to one of their bands he was given jackal’s flesh to eat.

Again, the rite of initiation or investiture with the sacred thread appears to be the occasion of the admission of a boy to the caste community. Before this he is not really a member of the caste and may eat any kind of food. The initiation is called by the Brāhmans the second birth, and appears to be the birth of the soul or spirit. After it the boy will eat the sacrificial food at the caste feasts and be united with the members of the caste and their god. The bodies of children who have not been initiated are buried and not burnt. The reason seems to be that their spirits will not go to the god nor be united with the ancestors, but will be born again. Formerly such children were often buried in the house or courtyard so that their spirits might be born again in the same family. The lower castes sometimes consider the rite of ear-piercing as the initiation and sometimes marriage. Among the Panwār Rājpūts a child is initiated when about two years old by being given cooked rice and milk to eat. The initiation cannot for some reason be performed by the natural father, but must be done by a guru or spiritual father, who should thereafter be regarded with a reverence equal to or even exceeding that paid to the natural father.

84. Penalty feasts.

When a man is readmitted to caste after exclusion for some offence, the principal feature of the rite is a feast at which he is again permitted to eat with his fellows. There are commonly two feasts, one known as the Maili Roti or impure meal, and the other as Chokhi or pure, both being at the cost of the offender. The former is eaten by the side of a stream or elsewhere on neutral ground, and by it the offender is considered to be partly purified; the latter is in his own house, and by eating there the castemen demonstrate that no impurity attaches to him, and he is again a full member. Some castes, as the Dhobas, have three feasts: the first is eaten at the bank of a stream, and at this the offender’s hair is shaved and thrown into the stream; the second is in his yard; and the third in his house. The offender is not allowed to partake of the first two meals himself, but he joins in the third, and before it begins the head of the panchāyat gives him water to drink in which gold has been dipped as a purificatory rite. Among the Gonds the flesh of goats is provided at the first meal, but at the second only grain cooked with water, which they now, in imitation of the Hindus, consider as the sacred sacrificial food. Frequently the view obtains that the head of the caste panchāyat takes the offender’s sins upon himself by commencing to eat, and in return for this a present of some rupees is deposited beneath his plate. Similarly among some castes, as the Bahnas, exclusion from caste is known as the stopping of food and water. The Gowāris readmit offenders by the joint drinking of opium and water. One member is especially charged with the preparation of this, and if there should not be enough for all the castemen to partake of it, he is severely punished. Opium was also considered sacred by the Rājpūts, and the chief and his kinsmen were accustomed to drink it together as a pledge of amity.

85. Sanctity of grain-food.

Grain cooked with water is considered as sacred food by the Hindus. It should be eaten only on a space within the house called chauka purified with cowdung, and sometimes marked out with white quartz-powder or flour. Before taking his meal a member of the higher castes should bathe and worship the household gods. At the meal he should wear no sewn clothes, but only a waist-cloth made of silk or wool, and not of cotton. The lower castes will take food cooked with water outside the house in the fields, and are looked down upon for doing this, so that those who aspire to raise their social position abandon the practice, or at least pretend to do so. Sir J.G. Frazer quotes a passage showing that the ancient Brāhmans considered the sacrificial rice-cakes cooked with water to be transformed into human bodies. The Urdu word bali means a sacrifice or offering, and is applied to the portion of the daily meal which is offered to the gods and to the hearth-fire. Thus all grain cooked with water is apparently looked upon as sacred or sacramental food, and it is for this reason that it can only be eaten after the purificatory rites already described. The grain is venerated as the chief means of subsistence, and the communal eating of it seems to be analogous to the sacrificial eating of the domestic animals, such as the camel, horse, ox and sheep, which is described above and in the article on Kasai. Just as in the hunting stage the eating of the totem-animal, which furnished the chief means of subsistence, was the tie which united the totem-clan: and in the pastoral stage the domestic animal which afforded to the tribe its principal support, not usually as an article of food, but through its milk and its use as a means of transport, was yet eaten sacrificially owing to the persistence of the belief that the essential bond which united the tribe was the communal eating of the flesh of the animal from which the tribe obtained its subsistence: so when the community reaches the agricultural stage the old communal feast is retained as the bond of union, but it now consists of grain, which is the principal support of life.

86. The corn-sprit.

The totem-animal was regarded as a kinsman, and the domestic animal often as a god. But in both these cases the life of the kinsman and god was sacrificed in order that the community might be bound together by eating the body and assimilating the life. Consequently, when grain came to be the sacrificial food, it was often held that an animal or human being must be sacrificed in the character of the corn-god or spirit, whether his own flesh was eaten or the sacred grain was imagined to be his flesh. Numerous instances of the sacrifice of the corn-spirit have been adduced by Sir J.G. Frazer in The Golden Bough, and it was he who brought this custom prominently to notice. One of the most important cases in India was the Meriah-sacrifice of the Khonds, which is described in the article on that tribe.

Two features of the Khond sacrifice of a human victim as a corn-spirit appear to indicate its derivation from the sacrifice of the domestic animal and the eating of the totem-animal, the ties uniting the clan and tribe: first, that the flesh was cut from the living victim, and, second, that the sacrifice was communal. When the Meriah-victim was bound the Khonds hacked at him with their knives while life remained, leaving only the head and bowels untouched, so that each man might secure a strip of flesh. This rite appears to recall the earliest period when the members of the primitive group or clan tore their prey to pieces and ate and drank the raw flesh and blood. The reason for its survival was apparently that it was the actual life of the divine victim, existing in concrete form in the flesh and blood which they desired to obtain, and they thought that this end was more certainly achieved by cutting the flesh off him while he was still alive. In the sacrifice of the camel in Arabia the same procedure was followed; the camel was bound on an altar and the tribesmen cut the flesh from the body with their knives and swallowed it raw and bleeding. M. Salomon Reinach shows how the memory of similar sacrifices in Greece has been preserved in legend: “Actaeon was really a great stag sacrificed by women devotees, who called themselves the great hind and the little hinds; he became the rash hunter who surprised Artemis at her bath and was transformed into a stag and devoured by his own dogs. The dogs are a euphemism; in the early legend they were the human devotees of the sacred stag who tore him to pieces and devoured him with their bare teeth. These feasts of raw flesh survived in the secret religious cults of Greece long after uncooked food had ceased to be consumed in ordinary life. Orpheus (ophreus, the haughty), who appears in art with the skin of a fox on his head, was originally a sacred fox devoured by the women of the fox totem-clan; these women call themselves Bassarides in the legend, and bassareus is one of the old names of the fox. Hippolytus in the fable is the son of Theseus who repels the advances of Phaedra, his stepmother, and was killed by his runaway horses because Theseus, deceived by Phaedra, invoked the anger of a god upon him. But Hippolytus in Greek means ‘one torn to pieces by horses.’ Hippolytus is himself a horse whom the worshippers of the horse, calling themselves horses and disguised as such, tore to pieces and devoured.” All such sacrifices in which the flesh was taken from the living victim may thus perhaps be derived from the common origin of totemism. The second point about the Khond sacrifice is that it was communal; every householder desired a piece of the flesh, and for those who could not be present at the sacrifice relays of messengers were posted to carry it to them while it was still fresh and might be supposed to retain the life. They did not eat the strips of flesh, but each householder buried his piece in his field, which they believed would thereby be fertilised and caused to produce the grain which they would eat. The death of the victim was considered essential to the life of the tribe, which would be renewed and strengthened by it as in the case of the sacrifice of the domestic animal. Lord Avebury gives in The Origin of Civilisation an almost exact parallel to the Khond sacrifice in which the flesh of the victim actually was eaten. This occurred among the Marimos, a tribe of South Africa much resembling the Bechuanas. The ceremony was called ‘the boiling of the corn.’ A young man, stout but of small stature, was usually selected and secured by violence or by intoxicating him with yaala. “They then lead him into the fields, and sacrifice him in the fields, according to their own expression, for seed. His blood, after having been coagulated by the rays of the sun, is burned along with the frontal bone, the flesh attached to it and the brain. The ashes are then scattered over the fields to fertilise them and the remainder of the body is eaten.” In other cases quoted by the same author an image only was made of flour and eaten instead of a human being: “In Mexico at a certain period of the year the priest of Quetzalcoatl made an image of the Deity, of meal mixed with infants’ blood, and then, after many impressive ceremonies, killed the image by shooting it with an arrow, and tore out the heart, which was eaten by the king, while the rest of the body was distributed among the people, every one of whom was anxious to procure a piece to eat, however small.” Here the communal sacrificial meal, the remaining link necessary to connect the sacrifice of the corn-spirit with that of the domestic animal and clan totem, is present. Among cases of animals sacrificed as the corn-spirit in India that of the buffalo at the Dasahra festival is the most important. The rite extends over most of India, and a full and interesting account of it has recently been published by Mr. W. Crooke. The buffalo is probably considered as the corn-spirit because it was the animal which mainly damaged the crops in past times. Where the sacrifice still survives the proprietor of the village usually makes the first cut in the buffalo and it is then killed and eaten by the inferior castes, as Hindus cannot now touch the flesh. In the Deccan after the buffalo is killed the Mahārs rush on the carcase and each one secures a piece of the flesh. This done they go in procession round the walls, calling on the spirits and demons, and asking them to accept the pieces of meat as offerings, which are then thrown to them backwards over the wall. The buffalo is now looked upon in the light of a scape-goat, but the procedure described above cannot be satisfactorily explained on the scape-goat theory, and would appear clearly to have been substituted for the former eating of the flesh. In the Marātha Districts the lower castes have a periodical sacrifice of a pig to the sun; they eat the flesh of the pig together, and even the Panwār Rājpūts of the Waringanga Valley join in the sacrifice and will allow the impure caste of Mahars to enter their houses and eat of this sacrifice with them, though at other times the entry of a Mahār would defile a Panwār’s house. The pig is sacrificed either as the animal which now mainly injures the crops or because it was the principal sacrificial animal of the non-Aryan tribes, or from a combination of both reasons. Probably it may be regarded as the corn-spirit because pigs are sacrificed to Bhanisasur or the buffalo demon for the protection of the crops.

87. The king.

When the community reached the national or agricultural stage some central executive authority became necessary for its preservation. This authority usually fell into the hands of the priest who performed the sacrifice, and he became a king. Since the priest killed the sacrificial animal in which the common life of the community was held to be centred, it was thought that the life passed to him and centred in his person. For the idea of the extinction of life was not properly understood, and the life of a human being or animal might pass by contact, according to primitive ideas, to the person or even the weapon which killed it, just as it could pass by assimilation to those who ate the flesh. In most of the city-states of Greece and Italy the primary function of the kings was the performance of the communal or national sacrifices. Through this act they obtained political power as representing the common life of the people, and its performance was sometimes left to them after their political power had been taken away. After the expulsion of the kings from Rome the duty of performing the city sacrifices devolved on the consuls. In India also the kings performed sacrifices. When a king desired to be paramount over his neighbours he sent a horse to march through their territories. If it passed through them without being captured they became subordinate to the king who owned the horse. Finally the horse was sacrificed at the Ashva-medha, the king paramount making the sacrifice, while the other kings performed subordinate parts at it. Similarly the Rāja of Nāgpur killed the sacrificial buffalo at the Dasahra festival. But the common life of the people was sometimes conveyed from the domestic animal to the king by other methods than the performance of a sacrifice. The king of Unyoro in Africa might never eat vegetable food but must subsist on milk and beef. Mutton he might not touch, though he could drink beer after partaking of meat. A sacred herd was kept for the king’s use, and nine cows, neither more nor less, were daily brought to the royal enclosure to be milked for his majesty. The boy who brought the cows from the pasture to the royal enclosure must be a member of a particular clan and under the age of puberty, and was subject to other restrictions. The milk for the king was drawn into a sacred pot which neither the milkman nor anybody else might touch. The king drank the milk, sitting on a sacred stool, three times a day, and any which was left over must be drunk by the boy who brought the cows from pasture. Numerous other rules and restrictions are detailed by Sir J.G. Frazer, and it may be suggested that their object was to ensure that the life of the domestic animal and with it the life of the people should be conveyed pure and undefiled to the king through the milk. The kings of Unyoro had to take their own lives while their bodily vigour was still unimpaired. When the period for his death arrived the king asked his wife for a cup of poison and drank it. “The public announcement of the death was made by the chief milkman. Taking a pot of the sacred milk in his hands he mounted the house-top and cried, ‘Who will drink the milk?’ With these words he dashed the pot on the roof; it rolled off and falling to the ground was broken in pieces. That was the signal for war to the death between the princes who aspired to the throne. They fought till only one was left alive. He was the king.” After completing the above account, of which only the principal points have been stated, Sir J.G. Frazer remarks: “The rule which obliged the kings of Unyoro to kill themselves or be killed before their strength of mind and body began to fail through disease or age is only a particular example of a custom which appears to have prevailed widely among barbarous tribes in Africa and to some extent elsewhere. Apparently this curious practice rests on a belief that the welfare of the people is sympathetically bound up with the welfare of their king, and that to suffer him to fall into bodily or mental decay would be to involve the whole kingdom in ruin.” Other instances connecting the life of the king with the ox or other domestic animal are given in Totemism and Exogamy and The Golden Bough Among the Hereros the body of a dead chief was wrapped up in the hide of an ox before being buried. In the Vedic horse-sacrifice in India the horse was stifled in robes. The chief queen approached him; a cloak having been thrown over them both, she performed a repulsively obscene act symbolising the transmission to her of his fructifying powers. In other cases the king was identified with the corn-spirit, and in this manner he also, it may be suggested, represented the common life of the people.

The belief that the king was the incarnation of the common life of the people led to the most absurd restrictions on his liberty and conduct, a few instances of which from the large collection in The Golden Bough have been quoted in the article on Nai. Thus in an old account of the daily life of the Mikado it is stated: “In ancient times he was obliged to sit on the throne for some hours every morning, with the imperial crown on his head, but to sit altogether like a statue, without stirring either hands or feet, head or eyes, nor indeed any part of his body, because, by this means, it was thought that he could preserve peace and tranquillity in his empire; for if, unfortunately, he turned himself on one side or the other, or if he looked a good while towards any part of his dominions, it was apprehended that war, famine, fire or some great misfortune was near at hand to desolate the country.” Here it would appear that by sitting absolutely immobile the king conferred the quality of tranquillity on the common life of his people incarnate in his person; but by looking too long in any one direction he would cause a severe disturbance of the common life in the part to which he looked. And when the Israelites were fighting with the Amalekites, so long as Moses held up his hands the Israelites prevailed; but when his hands hung down they gave way before the enemy. Here apparently the common life was held to be centred in Moses, and when he held his arms up it was vigorous, but declined as he let them down. Similarly it was often thought that the king should be killed as soon as his bodily strength showed signs of waning, so that the common life might be renewed and saved from a similar decay. Even the appearance of grey hair or the loss of a tooth were sometimes considered sufficient reasons for putting the king to death in Africa. Another view was that any one who killed the king was entitled to succeed him, because the life of the king, and with it the common life of the people, passed to the slayer, just as it had previously passed from the domestic animal to the priest-king who sacrificed it. One or two instances of succession by killing the king are given in the article on Bhīl. Sometimes the view was that the king should be sacrificed annually, or at other intervals, like the corn-spirit or domestic animal, for the renewal of the common life. And this practice, as shown by Sir J.G. Frazer, tended to result in the substitution of a victim, usually a criminal or slave, who was identified with the king by being given royal honours for a short time before his death. Sometimes the king’s son or daughter was offered as a substitute for him, and such a sacrifice was occasionally made in time of peril, apparently as a means of strengthening or preserving the common life. When Chitor, the home of the Sesodia clan of Rājpūts, was besieged by the Muhammadans, the tradition is that the goddess of their house appeared and demanded the sacrifice of twelve chiefs as a condition of its preservation. Eleven of the chiefs sons were in turn crowned as king, and each ruled for three days, while on the fourth he sallied out and fell in battle. Lastly, the Rāna offered himself in order that his favourite son, Ajeysi, might be spared and might perpetuate the clan. In reality the chief and his sons seem to have devoted themselves in the hope that the sacrifice of the king might bring strength and victory to the clan. The sacrifice of Iphigenia and possibly of Jephthah’s daughter appear to be parallel instances. The story of Alcestis may be an instance of the substitution of the king’s wife. The position of the king in early society and the peculiar practices and beliefs attaching to it were brought to notice and fully illustrated by Sir J.G. Frazer. The argument as to the clan and the veneration of the domestic animal follows that outlined by the late Professor Robertson Smith in The Religion of the Semites.

88. Other instances of the common meal as a sacrificial rite.

Some other instances of the communal eating of grain or other food as a sacramental rite and bond of union have been given in the articles. Thus at a Kabīrpanthi Chauka or religious service the priest breaks a cocoanut on a stone, and the flesh is cut up and distributed to the worshippers with betel-leaf and sugar. Each receives it on his knees, taking the greatest care that none falls on the ground. The cocoanut is commonly regarded by the Hindus as a substituted offering for a human head. The betel-leaves which are distributed have been specially consecrated by the head priest of the sect, and are held to represent the body of Kabīr.

Similarly, Guru Govind Singh instituted a prasād or communion among the Sikhs, in which cakes of flour, butter and sugar are made and consecrated with certain ceremonies while the communicants sit round in prayer, and are then distributed equally to all the faithful present, to whatever caste they may belong. At a Guru-Māta or great council of the Sikhs, which was held at any great crisis in the affairs of the state, these cakes were laid before the Sikh scriptures and then eaten by all present, who swore on the scriptures to forget their internal dissensions and be united. Among the Rājpūts the test of legitimacy of a member of the chief’s family was held to depend on whether he had eaten of the chief’s food. The rice cooked at the temple of Jagannāth in Orissa may be eaten there by all castes together, and, when partaken of by two men together, is held to establish a bond of indissoluble friendship between them.

Members of several low castes of mixed origin will only take food with their relatives, and not with other families of the caste with whom they intermarry. The Chaukhutia Bhunjias will not eat food cooked by other members of the same community, and will not take it from their own daughters after the latter are married. At a feast among the Dewars uncooked food is distributed to the guests, who cook it for themselves; parents will not accept cooked food either from married sons or daughters, and each family with its children forms a separate commensal group. Thus the taking of food together is a more important and sacred tie than intermarriage. In most Hindu castes a man is not put out of caste for committing adultery with a woman of low caste, but for taking cooked food from her hands; though it is assumed that if he lives with her openly he must necessarily have accepted cooked food from her. Opium and alcoholic liquor or wine, being venerated on account of their intoxicating qualities, were sometimes regarded as substitutes for the sacrificial food and partaken of sacramentally.

89. Funeral feasts.

An important class of communal meals remaining for discussion consists in the funeral feasts. The funeral feast seems a peculiar and unseasonable observance, but several circumstances point to the conclusion that it was originally held in the dead man’s own interest. He or his spirit was indeed held to participate in the feast, and it seems to have been further thought that unless he did so and ate the sacred food, his soul would not proceed to the heaven or god, but would wander about as an unquiet spirit or meet with some other fate. Many of the lower Hindu castes, such as the Kohlis and Bishnois, take food after a funeral, seated by the side of the grave. This custom is now considered somewhat derogatory, perhaps in consequence of a truer realisation of the fact of death. At a Baiga funeral the mourners take one white and one black fowl to a stream and kill and eat them there, setting aside a portion for the dead man. The Gonds also take their food and drink liquor at the grave. The Lohārs think that the spirit of the dead man returns to join in the funeral feast. Among the Telugu Koshtis the funeral party go to the grave on the fifth day, and after the priest has worshipped the image of Vishnu on the grave, the whole party take their food there. After a Panka funeral the mourners bathe and then break a cocoanut over the grave and distribute it among themselves. On the tenth day they go again and break a cocoanut, and each man buries a little piece of it in the earth over the grave. Among the Tameras, at the feast with which mourning is concluded, a leaf-plate containing a portion for the deceased is placed outside the house with a pot of water and a burning lamp to guide his spirit to the food. On the third day after death the Kolhātis sometimes bring back the skull of a corpse and, placing it on the bed, offer to it powder, dates and betel-leaves, and after a feast lasting for three days it is again buried. It is said that the members of the Lingāyat sect formerly set up the corpse in their midst at the funeral feast and sat round it, taking their food, but the custom is not known to exist at present. Among the Bangalas, an African negro tribe, at a great funeral feast lasting for three days in honour of the chief’s son, the corpse was present at the festivities tied in a chair.

90. The Hindu deities and the sacrificial meal.

Thus there seems reason to suppose that the caste-tie of the Hindus is the same as that which united the members of the city-states of Greece and Italy, that is the eating of a sacramental food together. Among the Vedic Aryans that country only was considered pure and fit for sacrifice in which the Aryan gods had taken up their residence. Hindustān was made a pure country in which Aryans could offer sacrifices by the fact that Agni, the sacrificial god of fire, spread himself over it. But the gods have changed. The old Vedic deities Indra, the rain-god, Varuna, the heaven-god, the Marūts or winds, and Soma, the divine liquor, have fallen into neglect. These were the principal forces which controlled the existence of a nomad pastoral people, dependent on rain to make the grass grow for their herds, and guiding their course by the sun and stars. The Soma or liquor apparently had a warming, exhilarating effect in the cold climate of the Central Asian steppes, and was therefore venerated. Since in the hot plains of India abstinence from alcoholic liquor has become a principal religious tenet of high-caste Hindus, Soma is naturally no more heard of. Agni, the fire-god, was also one of the greatest deities to the nomads of the cold uplands, as the preserver of life against cold. But in India, except as represented by the hearth, for cooking, little regard is paid to him, since fires are not required for warmth. New gods have arisen in Hinduism. The sun was an important Vedic deity, both as Mitra and under other names. Vishnu as the sun, or the spirit of whom the sun is the visible embodiment, has become the most important deity in his capacity of the universal giver and preserver of life. He is also widely venerated in his anthropomorphic forms of Rāma, the hero-prince of Ajodhia and leader of the Aryan expedition to Ceylon, and Krishna, the divine cowherd, perhaps some fabled hero sprung from the indigenous tribes. Siva is the mountain-god of the Himalayas and a moon-deity, and in his character of god of destruction the lightning and cobra are associated with him. But he is really worshipped in his beneficent form of the phallic emblem as the agent of life, and the bull, the fertiliser of the soil and provider of food. Devi, the earth, is the great mother goddess. Sprung from her are Hanumān, the monkey-god, and Ganpati, the elephant-god, and in one of her forms, as the terrible goddess Kāli, she is perhaps the deified tiger. Lachmi, the goddess of wealth, and held to have been evolved from the cow, is the consort of Vishnu. It was thus not the god to whom the sacrifice was offered, but the sacrifice itself that was the essential thing, and participation in the common eating of the sacrifice constituted the bond of union. In early times a sacrifice was the occasion for every important gathering or festivity, as is shown both in Indian history and legend. And the caste feasts above described seem to be the continuation and modern form of the ancient sacrifice.

91. Development of the occupational caste from the tribe.

The Roman population, as already seen, consisted of a set of clans or gentes. The clans were collected in tribal groups such as the curia, but it does not appear that these latter were endogamous. The rite which constituted a Roman citizen was participation in the Suovetaurilia, the communal sacrifice of the domestic animals, the pig, the ram, and the bull. Since all the Roman citizens at first lived in a comparatively small area, they were all able to be present at the sacrifice. The other states of Greece and Italy had an analogous constitution, as stated by M. Fustel de Coulanges. It may be supposed that the Aryans were similarly divided into clans and tribes. The word visha, the substantive root of Vaishya, originally meant a clan. But as pointed out by M. Senart, they did not form city-states in India, but settled in villages over a large area of country. Their method of government was by small states under kings, and probably they had a kind of national constitution, of which the king was the centre and embodiment. But these states gradually lost their individuality, and were merged in large empires, where the king could no longer be the centre of the state or of the common life of his people, nor perform a sacrifice at which they could all be present, as the Roman kings did. This religious idea of nationality, based on participation in a common sacrifice, was the only one which existed in early times. Thus apparently the Aryans retained their tribal constitution instead of expanding it into a national one, and the members of clans within a certain local area gathered for a communal sacrifice. But there was a great class, that of the Sūdras or indigenous inhabitants, who could not join in the sacrifices at all. And between the Sūdras and the Vaishyas or main body of the Aryans there gradually grew up another mixed class, which also could not properly participate in them. The priests and rulers, Brāhmans and Kshatriyas, tended to form exclusive bodies, and in this manner a classification by occupation gradually grew up, the distinction being marked by participation in separate sacrificial feasts. The cause which ultimately broke down the religious distinctions of the Roman and Greek states was the development of a feeling of nationality. In the common struggle for the preservation of the city the prejudices of the patricians weakened, and after a long internal conflict, the plebeians were admitted to full rights of citizenship. The plebeians were employed as infantry in the Roman armies, while the patricians rode, and the increased importance of infantry in war was one great cause of the improvement in the position of the plebeians. In India, in the absence of any national feeling, and with the growth of a large and powerful priestly order, religious barriers and prejudices became accentuated rather than weakened. The class distinctions grew more rigid, and gradually, as the original racial line of cleavage was fused by intermarriage and the production of groups of varying status, these came to arrange themselves on a basis of occupation. This is the inevitable and necessary rule in all societies whose activities and mode of life are at all complicated. Racial distinctions cannot be preserved unless in the most exceptional cases, where they are accentuated by the difference of colour, and such a moral and social gulf as that which exists between the whites and negroes in North America. In primitive society there is no such mental cleavage to render the idea of fusion abhorrent to the superior race; the bar is religious, and while it places the inferior race in a despised and abject position, there is no prohibition of illicit unions nor any such moral feeling or principle as would tend to restrict them. The ideas of the responsibilities and duties of parentage in connection with heredity, or the science of eugenics, are entirely modern, and have no place at all in ancient society. As racial and religious distinctions fade away, and social progress takes place, a fresh set of divisions by wealth and occupation grows up. But though this happened also in the Greek and Italian cities, the old religious divisions were not transferred to the new occupational groups, but fell slowly into abeyance, and the latter assumed the simply social character which they have in modern communities. The main reason for the obliteration of religious barriers, as already stated, was the growth of the idea of nationality and the public interest. But in India the feeling of nationality never arose. The Hindu states and empires had no national basis, since at the period in question the only way in which the idea of nationality could be conceived, was by participation of the citizens in a common sacrifice, and this participation is only possible to persons living in a small local area. Hence Hindu society developed on its own lines independently of the form of government to which it was subject, and in the new grouping by occupation the old communal sacrifices were preserved and adapted to the fresh divisions. The result was the growth of the system of occupational castes which still exists. But since the basis of society was the participation of each social group in a communal meal, the group could not be extended to take in persons of the same occupation over a large area, and as a result the widely ramified system of subcastes came into existence. The subcaste or commensal group was the direct evolutionary product of the pre-existing tribe. Its size was limited by the fact that its members had to meet at the periodical sacrificial feasts, by which their unity and the tie which bound them together was cemented and renewed. As already seen, when members of a subcaste migrated to a fresh local area, and were cut off from communication with those remaining behind, they tended as a rule to form a fresh endogamous and commensal group. Since the tie between the members of the subcaste was participation in a sacrificial meal of grain cooked with water, and as this food was held to be sacred, the members of the subcaste came to refuse to eat it except with those who could join in the communal feast; and as the idea gradually gained acceptance, that a legitimate child must be the offspring of a father and mother both belonging to the commensal group, the practice of endogamy within the subcaste became a rule.

92. Veneration of the caste implements.

Since all the citizens of the Roman State participated in a common sacrifice, they might be considered as a single caste, or even a subcaste or commensal group. The Hindu castes have a common ceremony which presents some analogy to that of the Roman state. They worship or pay homage once or twice a year to the implements of their profession. The occasions for this rite are usually the Dasahra festival in September and the fast after the Holi festival in March. Both these are festivals of the goddess Devi or Mother Earth, when a fast is observed in her honour, first before sowing the spring crops and secondly before reaping them. On each occasion the fast lasts for nine days and the Jawaras or pots of wheat corresponding to the Gardens of Adonis are sown. The fasts and festivals thus belong primarily to the agricultural castes, and they worship the earth-mother, who provides them with subsistence. But the professional and artisan castes also take the occasion to venerate the implements of their profession. Thus among the Kasārs or brass-workers, at the festival of Mando Amāwas or the new moon of Chait (March), every Kasār must return to the community of which he is a member and celebrate the feast with them. And in default of this he will be expelled from the caste until the next Amāwas of Chait comes round. They close their shops and worship the implements of their profession on this day. The rule is thus the same as that of the Roman Suovetaurilia. He who does not join in the sacrificial feast ceases to be a member of the community. And the object of veneration is the same; the Romans venerated and sacrificed the domestic animals which in the pastoral stage had been their means of subsistence. The Kasārs and other occupational castes worship the implements of their profession which are also their means of livelihood, or that which gives them life. Formerly all these implements were held to be animate, and to produce their effect by their own power and volition. The Nats or acrobats of Bombay say that their favourite and only living gods are those which give them their bread: the drum, the rope and the balancing-pole. The Murha or earth-digger invokes the implements of his trade as follows: “O, my lord the basket, my lord the pickaxe shaped like a snake, and my lady the hod! Come and eat up those who do not pay me for my work!” Similarly the Dhīmar venerates his fishing-net, and will not wear shoes of sewn leather, because he thinks that the sacred thread which makes his net is debased if used for shoes. The Chamār worships his currier’s knife; the Ghasia or groom his horse and the peg to which the horse is secured in the stable; the Rājpūt his horse and sword and shield; the writer his inkpot, and so on. The Pola festival of the Kunbis has a feature resembling the Suovetaurilia. On this occasion all the plough-bullocks of the cultivators are mustered and go in procession to a toran or arch constructed of branches and foliage. The bullock of the village proprietor leads the way, and has flaming torches tied to his horns. The bullocks of the other cultivators follow according to the status of each cultivator in the village, which depends upon hereditary right and antiquity of tenure, and not on mere wealth. A Kunbi feels bitterly insulted if his bullocks are not awarded the proper place in the procession. A string across the arch is broken by the leading bullock, and the cattle are then all driven helter-skelter through the arch and back to the village. The rite would appear to be a relic of the communal sacrifice of a bullock, the torches tied to the proprietor’s bullock signifying that he was formerly killed and roasted. It is now said that this bullock is full of magic, and that he will die within three years. The rite may be compared to the needfire as practised in Russia when all the horses of the village were driven between two fires, or through fire, and their bridles thrown into the fire and burnt. The burning of the bridles would appear to be a substitute for the previous sacrifice of the horse. The Pola ceremony of the Kunbis resembles the Roman Suovetaurilia inasmuch as all the cultivators participate in it according to their status, just as the rank of Roman citizens was determined by their position at the ceremony. Formerly, if a bull was sacrificed and eaten sacramentally it would have been practically an exact parallel to the Roman rite.

93. The caste panchāyat and its code of offences.

The tribunal for the punishment of caste offences is known as the panchāyat, because it usually consists of five persons (pānch, five). As a rule a separate panchāyat exists for every subcaste over an area not too large for all the members of it to meet. In theory, however, the panchāyat is only the mouthpiece of the assembly, which should consist of all the members of the subcaste. Some castes fine a member who absents himself from the meeting. The panchāyat may perhaps be supposed to represent the hand acting on behalf of the subcaste, which is considered the body. The panchāyat, however, was not the original judge. It was at first the god before whom the parties pleaded their cause, and the god who gave judgment by the method of trial by ordeal. This was probably the general character of primitive justice, and in some of the lower castes the ordeal is still resorted to for decisions. The tribe or subcaste attended as jurors or assessors, and carried out the proceedings, perhaps after having united themselves to the god for the purpose by a sacrificial meal. The panchāyat, having succeeded the god as the judge, is held to give its decisions by divine inspiration, according to the sayings: ‘God is on high and the panch on earth,’ and ‘The voice of the panchāyat is the voice of God.’ The headship of the panchāyat and the subcaste commonly descends in one family, or did so till recently, and the utmost deference is shown to the person holding it, even though he may be only a boy for the above reason. The offences involving temporary or permanent excommunication from caste are of a somewhat peculiar kind. In the case of both a man and woman, to take food from a person of a caste from whom it is forbidden to do so, and especially from one of an impure caste, is a very serious offence, as is also that of being beaten by a member of an impure caste, especially with a shoe. It is also a serious offence to be sent to jail, because a man has to eat the impure jail food. To be handcuffed is a minor offence, perhaps by analogy with the major one of being sent to jail, or else on account of the indignity involved by the touch of the police. As regards sexual offences, there is no direct punishment for a man as a rule, but if he lives with a low-caste woman he is temporarily expelled because it is assumed that he has taken food from her hands. Sometimes a man and woman of the caste committing adultery together are both punished. A married woman who commits adultery should in the higher and middle castes, in theory at least, be permanently expelled, but if her husband does not put her away she is sometimes readmitted with a severe punishment. A girl going wrong with an outsider is as a rule expelled unless the matter can be hushed up, but if she becomes pregnant by a man of the caste, she can often be readmitted with a penalty and married to him or to some other man. There are also some religious crimes, such as killing a cow or a cat or other sacred domestic animal; and in the case of a woman it is a very serious offence to get the lobe of her ear torn apart at the large perforation usually made for earrings; while for either a man or a woman to get vermin in a wound is an offence of the first magnitude, entailing several months’ exclusion and large expenditure on readmission. Offences against ordinary morality are scarcely found in the category of those entailing punishment. Murder must sometimes be expiated by a pilgrimage to the Ganges, but other criminal offences against the person and property are not taken cognisance of by the caste committee unless the offender is sent to jail. Both in its negative and positive aspects the category of offences affords interesting deductions on the basis of the explanation of the caste system already given. The reason why there is scarcely any punishment for offences against ordinary morality is that the caste organisation has never developed any responsibility for the maintenance of social order and the protection of life and property. It has never exercised the function of government, because in the historical Hindu period India was divided into large military states, while since then it has been subject to foreign domination. The social organisation has thus maintained its pristine form, neither influenced by the government nor affording to it any co-operation or support. And the aims of the caste tribunal have been restricted to preserving its own corporate existence free from injury or pollution, which might arise mainly from two sources. If a member’s body was rendered impure either by eating impure food or by contact with a person of impure caste it became an unfit receptacle for the sacred food eaten at the caste feast, which bound its members together in one body. This appears to be the object of the rules about food. And since the blood of the clan and of the caste is communicated by descent through the father under the patriarchal system, adultery on the part of a married woman would bring a stranger into the group and undermine its corporate existence and unity. Hence the severity of the punishment for the adultery of a married woman, which is a special feature of the patriarchal system. It has already been seen that under the rule of female descent, as shown by Mr. Hartland in Primitive Paternity, the chastity of women was as a rule scarcely regarded at all or even conceived of. After the change to the patriarchal system a similar laxity seems to have prevailed for some period, and it was thought that any child born to a man in his house or on his bed was his own, even though he might not be the father. This idea obtained among the Arabs, as pointed out by Professor Robertson Smith in Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia, and is also found in the Hindu classics, and to some extent even in modern practice. It was perhaps based on the virtue assigned to concrete facts; just as the Hindus think that a girl is properly married by going through the ceremony with an arrow or a flower, and that the fact of two children being suckled by the same woman, though she is not their mother, establishes a tie akin to consanguinity between them, so they might have thought that the fact of a boy being born in a man’s house constituted him the man’s son. Subsequently, however, the view came to be held that the clan blood was communicated directly through the father, to whom the life of the child was solely assigned in the early patriarchal period. And the chastity of married women then became of vital importance to the community, because the lack of it would cause strangers to be born into the clan, which now based its tie of kinship on descent from a common male ancestor. Thus the adultery of women became a crime which would undermine the foundations of society and the state, and as such was sometimes punished with death among communities in the early patriarchal stage. It is this view, and not simply moral principle, which has led to the severe caste penalties for the offence. Some of the primitive tribes care nothing about the chastity of unmarried girls, but punish unfaithful wives rigorously. Among the Māria Gonds a man will murder his wife for infidelity, but girls are commonly unchaste. Another rule sometimes found is that an unmarried girl becoming with child by an outsider is put out of caste for the time. When her child, which does not belong to the caste, has been born, she must make it over to some outside family, and she herself can then be readmitted to the community. Out of the view of adultery as a religious and social offence, a moral regard for chastity is however developing among the Hindus as it has in other societies.

94. The status of impurity.

It has been seen that the Sūdras as well as the plebeians were regarded as impure, and the reason was perhaps that they were considered to belong to a hostile god. By their participation in the sacrifice and partaking of the sacrificial food, the Indian Aryans and other races considered that they were not only in fellowship with, but actually a part of the god. And similarly their enemies were part of the substance of a hostile god, whose very existence and contact were abhorrent to their own. Hence their enemies should as far as possible be completely exterminated, but when this was impossible they must dwell apart and not pollute by contact of their persons, or in any other way, the sacred soil on which the gods dwelt, nor the persons of those who became part of the substance of the god by participation in the sacrificial meal. For this reason the plebeians had to live outside the Roman city, which was all sacred ground, and the Sūdras and modern impure castes have to live outside the village, which is similarly sacred as the abode of the earth-goddess in her form of the goddess of the land of that village. For the same reason their contact had to be avoided by those who belonged to the village and were united to the goddess by partaking of the crops which she brought forth on her land. As already seen, the belief existed that the life and qualities could be communicated by contact, and in this case the worshippers would assimilate by contact the life of a god hostile to their own. In the same manner, as shown by M. Salomon Reinach in Cults, Myths and Religions, all the weapons, clothes and material possessions of the enemy were considered as impure, perhaps because they also contained part of the life of a hostile god. As already seen, a man’s clothing and weapons were considered to contain part of his life by contact, and since the man was united to the god by partaking of the sacrificial feast, all the possessions of the enemy might be held to participate in the life of the hostile god, and hence they could not be preserved, nor taken by the victors into their own houses or dwellings. This was the offence which Achan committed when he hid in his tent part of the spoils of Jericho; and in consequence Jehovah ceased to be with the children of Israel when they went up against Ai, that is ceased to be in them, and they could not stand before the enemy. Achan and his family were stoned and his property destroyed by fire and the impurity was removed. For the same reason the ancient Gauls and Germans destroyed all the spoils of war or burned them, or buried them in lakes where they are still found. At a later stage the Romans, instead of destroying the spoils of war, dedicated them to their own gods, perhaps as a visible sign of the conquest and subjection of the enemy’s gods; and they were hung in temples or on oak-trees, where they could not be touched except in the very direst need, as when Rome was left without arms after Cannae. Subsequently the spoils were permitted to decorate the houses of the victorious generals, where they remained sacred and inviolable heirlooms.

95. Caste and Hinduism.

In The Religions of India M. Barth defined a Hindu as a man who has a caste: ‘The man who is a member of a caste is a Hindu; he who is not, is not a Hindu.’ His definition remains perhaps the best. There is practically no dogma which is essential to Hinduism, nor is the veneration of any deity or sacred object either necessary or heretical. As has often been pointed out, there is no assembly more catholic or less exclusive than the Hindu pantheon. Another writer has said that the three essentials of a Hindu are to be a member of a caste, to venerate Brāhmans, and to hold the cow sacred. Of the latter two, the veneration of Brāhmans cannot be considered indispensable; for there are several sects, as the Lingāyats, the Bishnois, the Mānbhaos, the Kabīrpanthis and others, who expressly disclaim any veneration for Brāhmans, and, in theory at least, make no use of their services; and yet the members of these sects are by common consent acknowledged as Hindus. The sanctity of the bull and cow is a more nearly universal dogma, and extends practically to all Hindus, except the impure castes. These latter should not correctly be classed as Hindus; the very origin of their status is, as has been seen, the belief that they are the worshippers of gods hostile to Hinduism. But still they must now practically be accounted as Hindus. They worship the Hindu gods, standing at a distance when they are not allowed to enter the temples, perform their ceremonies by Hindu rites, and employ Brāhmans for fixing auspicious days, writing the marriage invitation and other business, which the Brāhman is willing to do for a consideration, so long as he does not have to enter their houses. Some of the impure castes eat beef, while others have abandoned it in order to improve their social position. At the other end of the scale are many well-educated Hindu gentlemen who have no objection to eat beef and may often have done so in England, though in India they may abstain out of deference to the prejudices of their relatives, especially the women. And Hindus of all castes are beginning to sell worn-out cattle to the butchers for slaughter without scruple—an offence which fifty years ago would have entailed permanent expulsion from caste. The reverence for the cow is thus not an absolutely essential dogma of Hinduism, though it is the nearest approach to one. As a definition or test of Hinduism it is, however, obviously inadequate. Caste, on the other hand, regulates the whole of a Hindu’s life, his social position and, usually, his occupation. It is the only tribunal which punishes religious and social offences, and when a man is out of caste he has, for so long as this condition continues, no place in Hinduism. Theoretically he cannot eat with any other Hindu nor marry his child to any Hindu. If he dies out of caste the caste-men will not bury or burn his body, which is regarded as impure. The binding tie of caste is, according to the argument given above, the communal meal or feast of grain cooked with water, and this, it would therefore seem, may correctly be termed the chief religious function of Hinduism. Caste also obtains among the Jains and Sikhs, but Sikhism is really little more than a Hindu sect, while the Jains, who are nearly all Banias, scarcely differ from Vaishnava Hindu Banias, and have accepted caste, though it is not in accordance with the real tenets of their religion. The lower industrial classes of Muhammadans have also formed castes in imitation of the Hindus. Many of these are however the descendants of converted Hindus, and nearly all of them have a number of Hindu practices.

96. The Hindu reformers.

There have not been wanting reformers in Hinduism, and the ultimate object of their preaching seems to have been the abolition of the caste system. The totem-clans, perhaps, supposed that each species of animals and plants which they distinguished had a different kind of life, the qualities of each species being considered as part of its life. This belief may have been the original basis of the idea of difference of blood arising from nobility of lineage or descent, and it may also have been that from which the theory of caste distinctions was derived. Though the sacrificial food of each caste is the same, yet its members may have held themselves to be partaking of a different sacrificial feast and absorbing a different life; just as the sacrificial feasts and the gods of the different Greek and Latin city-states were held to be distinct and hostile, and a citizen of one state could not join in the sacrificial feast of another, though the gods and sacrificial animals might be as a matter of fact the same. And the earth-goddess of each village was a separate form or part of the goddess, so that her land should only be tilled by the descendants of the cultivators who were in communion with her. The severe caste penalties attached to getting vermin in a wound, involving a long period of complete ostracism and the most elaborate ceremonies of purification, may perhaps be explained by the idea that the man so afflicted has in his body an alien and hostile life which is incompatible with his forming part of the common life of the caste or subcaste. The leading feature of the doctrines of the Hindu reformers has been that there is only one kind of life, which extends through the whole of creation and is all equally precious. Everything that lives has a spark of the divine life and hence should not be destroyed. The belief did not extend to vegetable life, perhaps because the true nature of the latter was by then partly realised, while if the consumption of vegetable life had been prohibited the sect could not have existed. The above doctrine will be recognised as a comparatively simple and natural expansion of the beliefs that animals have self-conscious volitional life and that each species of animals consists of one common life distributed through its members. If the true nature of individual animals and plants had been recognised from the beginning, it is difficult to see how the idea of one universal life running through them all could have been conceived and have obtained so large a degree of acceptance. As the effect of such a doctrine was that all men were of the same blood and life, its necessary consequence was the negation of caste distinctions. The transmigration of souls followed as a moral rule apportioning reward and punishment for the actions of men. The soul passed through a cycle of lives, and the location or body of its next life, whether an animal of varying importance or meanness, or a human being in different classes of society, was determined by its good or evil actions in previous lives. Finally, those souls which had been purified of all the gross qualities appertaining to the body were released from the cycle of existence and reabsorbed into the divine centre or focus of life. In the case of the Buddhists and Jains the divine centre of life seems to have been conceived of impersonally. The leading authorities on Buddhism state that its founder’s doctrine was pure atheism, but one may suggest that the view seems somewhat improbable in the case of a religion promulgated at so early a period. And on such a hypothesis it is difficult to understand either the stress laid on the escape from life as the highest aim or the sanctity held to attach to all kinds of animal life. But these doctrines follow naturally on the belief in a divine centre or focus of life from which all life emanates for a time, to be ultimately reabsorbed. The Vaishnava reformers, who arose subsequently, took the sun or the spirit of the sun as the divine source of all life. They also preached the sanctity of animal life, the transmigration of souls, and the final absorption of the purified soul into the divine centre of life. The abolition of caste was generally a leading feature of their doctrine and may have been its principal social aim. The survival of the individual soul was not a tenet of the earlier reformers, though the later ones adopted it, perhaps in response to the growing perception of individuality. But even now it is doubtful how far the separate existence of the individual soul after it has finally left the world is a religious dogma of the Hindus. The basis of Hindu asceticism is the necessity of completely freeing the soul or spirit from all the appetites and passions of the body before it can be reabsorbed into the god. Those who have so mortified the body that the life merely subsists in it, almost unwillingly as it were, and absolutely unaffected by human desires or affections or worldly events, have rendered their individual spark of life capable of being at once absorbed into the divine life and equal in merit to it, while still on earth. Thus Hindu ascetics in the last or perfect stage say, ‘I am God,’ or ‘I am Siva,’ and are revered by their disciples and the people as divine. Both the Buddhists and Jains lay the same stress on the value of asceticism as enabling the soul to attain perfection through complete detachment from the appetites and passions of the body and the cares of the world; and the deduction therefore seems warranted that the end of the perfect soul would be a similar reabsorption in the divine soul.

97. Decline of the caste system.

The caste system has maintained its vigour unimpaired either by the political vicissitudes and foreign invasions of India or by Muhammadan persecution. Except where it has been affected by European education and inventions, Hindu society preserved until recently a remarkably close resemblance to that of ancient Greece and Rome in the classical period. But several signs point to the conclusion that the decay of caste as the governing factor of Indian society is in sight. The freedom in selection of occupation which now obtains appears to strike at the root of the caste system, because the relative social status and gradation of castes is based on their traditional occupations. When in a large number of the principal castes the majority of the members have abandoned their traditional occupation and taken freely to others, the relative status of castes becomes a fiction, which, though it has hitherto subsisted, cannot apparently be indefinitely maintained. The great extension of education undertaken by Government and warmly advocated by the best Indian opinion exercises an analogous influence. Education is free to all, and, similarly, in the careers which it opens to the most successful boys there is no account of caste. Thus members of quite low castes obtain a good social position and, as regards them personally, the prejudices and contempt for their caste necessarily fall into abeyance. The process must, probably, in time extend to general social toleration. The educated classes are also coming to regard the restrictions on food and drink, and on eating and drinking with others, as an irksome and unnecessary bar to social intercourse, and are gradually abandoning them. This tendency is greatly strengthened by the example and social contact of Europeans. Finally, the facilities for travelling and the democratic nature of modern travel have a very powerful effect. The great majority of Hindus of all castes are obliged by their comparative poverty to avail themselves of the cheap third-class fares, and have to rub shoulders together in packed railway carriages. Soon they begin to realise that this does them no harm, and get accustomed to it, with the result that the prejudices about bodily contact tend to disappear. The opinion has been given that the decline of social exclusiveness in England was largely due to the introduction of railway travelling. Taking account of all these influences, and assuming their continuance, the inference may safely be drawn that the life of the Indian caste system is limited, though no attempt can be made to estimate the degree of its vitality, nor to predict the form and constitution of the society which will arise on its decay.